Good books don’t always make great films

HAMBIDGE PRAISES AND POKES

Good books don’t always make great films

JOAN HAMBIDGE evaluates the film version of the recently deceased American writer Paul Auster's novel Book of Illusions.

I

VERSATILE. Productive. Tormented. That's how one can describe Paul Auster (1947 – 2024). American novelist, poet, memoir writer and filmmaker. And a friend of J.M. Coetzee. In Here and Now: Letters 2008 – 2011 one reads about their friendship. Both obsessed writers. Both practitioners of metafiction. Both fathers of murky sons.

J.M. Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee's son died when he fell off a building. Probably an accident. Auster's son, Daniel died of a drug overdose. His ten-month-old daughter Ruby died due to the negligence of her father, then a heroin addict. Before this tragedy, there were other incidents of the boy entering the underground of drug dealers and murderers. A corpse that was robbed and chopped up  ...

Painful. Let's rather leave it be.


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II

Auster writes superior novels. Labyrinth-like. Mirror texts. Double-barrelled. Palindromes. Disappearance and return of characters.

His film The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) evokes his novel The Book of Illusions (2002).

Prof. David Zimmer from Vermont is experiencing the painful loss of his wife and two sons. They died in a plane crash. He watches a film by Hector Mann, a comedian who disappeared in 1929. He watches all his films and writes a book about him.

He eventually publishes his novel and receives a letter from New Mexico, from Hector Mann's wife, to find the truth. Stories overlap. The death of Zimmer's family contrasted with the life of Mann, who has similarly struggled with loss and guilt.

Of course, Mann never existed, although an entire album of music was made about him by Duke Special.

Paul Auster is the narrator. David Thewlis (Martin) plays the role of the tormented writer placed opposite Irène Jacob (she was in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Red) as the muse. With Michael Imperioli as the handyman, who brings his scribblings to Martin for comment. With Sophie Auster, later as a cleaner, who wants to clean Martin's house. And fix up his bed, so to speak ...

The film often focuses on a spinning typewriter. Symbol for us experiencing everything from the perspective of the author. Black-and-white flashbacks to further emphasise this. Memory and experience are syncopated.

Meta-deliberations. But it becomes too predictable and contrived. Especially when one sets it against Federico Fellini's Otto e mezzo (8½) in 1963 where Guido Anselmi 's (Marcello Mastroianni) game with the film he wants to make and what we experience is brilliantly and seamlessly reproduced. And the unexpected arrival of his wife, Luisa (Anouk Amée) that further complicates everything. The mistress, the husband, and the experiences of his youth all perfectly juxtaposed. With humour and irony.

Italian film director and screenwriter Federico Fellini.
Italian film director and screenwriter Federico Fellini.

And the children who see the big woman, La Saraghina, dance the so-called Saragina rumba. With the priests “saving" the children ...

Guido Anselmi's “director's block" is presented in white and black. His idea for a sci-fi film is rejected by his critical readers though. In between, there is a beautiful woman he sees and his search for the Ideal Beloved (something Auster also touches on) becomes a theme.

The church is present too with Guido confessing his unhappiness and childhood mistakes.

Luisa and Rossella point out to Guido that he is lying about his relationship with Carla, which has passed. Likewise Luisa is unhappy about the way he represents her in his film. Then there's Claudia (Claudia Cardinale) – the Ideal Woman who confronts him with his inability to love.

As with Auster: burnout and dreams. With Fellini, a press conference convened by others on his behalf, trying to escape a terrified Guido.

With the ultimate discovery that he must accept everything: Life and his own flaws. The film ends in a circle with Guido and Luisa becoming part of the procession. The ending is a sci-fi movie of sorts.

And as Alberto Moravia noted at the time: Guido Anselmi is obsessed with criticism, a sadist, a masochist, a self-mythologising person, an adulterer, a clown, a liar ... He is afraid of life and wants to return to the womb. (In L'Espresso [Rome] February 17, 1963.)

The scene on the beach with the older woman in Rimini always stays with you. Same as when the young child is bathed and punished by the priests.

As with Auster double portraits: Fellini in his younger days resembles Mastroianni. And Otto e mezzo is semi-autobiographical.

III

Auster never gets away from his ruminations or metafiction. It works well and convincingly in a novel and the reader can make the leaps with the narrator. In this film, it's too contrived. Good books often make poor films. This film is too much navel-gazing.

And place it next to Otto e mezzo.

Then you see all the flaws: laborious, too much fabrication ...

♦ VWB ♦


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