What’s your favourite film adaptation?” a friend asked me last week. I was on my way to participate in a discussion about books being adapted into films, and had naturally been giving the matter some thought. But posed with a direct question of this sort, I realised it was difficult to come up with a straightforward answer. While several excellent films have been based on great, good and mediocre literary works, many of them have taken considered liberties with the source material. And in my experience, most lovers of a book tend to expect slavish faithfulness from the movie version.
But what would a slavishly faithful adaptation look like? Would it be like one of those respectable but unimaginative Masterpiece Theatre productions that are essentially “pictures of people talking” (to quote Hitchcock)? A really good film, on the other hand, will extensively use the techniques peculiar to its own medium — even when it is faithful to the plot and dialogue of the source novel. Consider the brilliant scene in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (an adaptation of Tagore’s story Nastanirh) where the heroine’s brother-in-law Amal — who will bring emotional turmoil into her life — makes his first appearance. Ray subtly darkens the frame as the weather outside turns stormy; as the wind gets stronger and the women of the house struggle with the clothesline, camera zooms are used to create an unsettling effect; and Amal’s sudden, dramatic entry, as he fills the frame and lunges forward to touch Charu’s feet, makes him seem like a personification of the squall outside; he’s genial, likeable, but the way the sequence is structured suggests that he is also, in a not yet knowable way, a threat. The scene is true to the book — and thematically apt — but it is also thoroughly cinematic.
During our session, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala made the point that any reader who loves a book will have his own mental image of what the characters look and sound like. (In the case of a fantasy novel, there may be entire landscapes to be imagined.) Since there’s no question of pleasing everyone, a director and screenwriter should be true to their own vision and realise it as adeptly as possible.
But one aspect of adaptation I find particularly intriguing is when a book is highly resistant to being filmed because of fundamental differences between literature and cinema. Ira Levin’s excellent suspense novel A Kiss Before Dying was filmed twice in Hollywood (and loosely adapted here into Shahrukh Khan’s star-making Baazigar) but the nature of the suspense generated by the book (where the killer’s identity is cunningly withheld from us until midway through the story) was very different from that in the films.
Another good example is Gautam Malkani’s 2006 novel Londonstani, which (Spoiler Alert) hinges on the reader being under the impression that the narrator, Jas, is a young British Asian when he is really a white lad trying to fit in with brown-complexioned “rudeboys”. This is revealed in the final few pages, and the only way I can think of for a film to exactly follow the book would be to use a self-consciously avant-garde technique like letting Jas’s eyes be the camera so we only get to see his face (perhaps in a mirror) at the very end. But this would also have other detrimental effects — it might prevent the viewer from relating to Jas as a character in his own right. Such cases provide a very particular challenge: make the deviations that are necessary while moving from one medium to the next, but try to capture something of the original’s essence. It isn’t an easy task, as any adapting screenwriter or director will tell you.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer