The adaptation of literary works to the cinema is far from being a novel concept. In 1902, The Lumière brothers adapted Jules Verne’s novel, From the Earth to the Moon, and named the film adaptation A Trip to the Moon. Silent cinema had a predilection for Shakespearian plays for its choices of literary adaptation. Since then, a veritable tale, if not of love, then of intimacy, has unfolded between the two arts, intertwining around shared facets despite substantial divergences.
This is the case of Eric Reinhardt’s novel, L’Amour et les forêts (Love and the Forests), published in 2014. This literary piece, which was in contention for the Goncourt Prize, received the Renaudot High School Students’ Prize and the France Culture-Télérama Prize. It was adapted for the silver screen by Valérie Donzelli and was part of the official selection of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
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From the novel to the film
The novel’s discourse centers around the following issue: How can the accepted reality crush the possibility, however clearly perceived, of well-being and happiness? The hyperrealistic narrative within Eric Reinhardt’s L’Amour et les forêts invites us to meet Bénédicte Ombredanne, a literary enthusiast, French teacher in Metz, married, and mother of two children, within the framework of a nested narrative structure. Motivated by her passion for literature, she writes a letter of fervent admiration to Eric Reinhardt (who is metafictionally inserted into the narrative) regarding one of his novels. Touched by the quality of the letter, the novelist suggests a meeting in a café in Paris. This is how the narrative begins, in which the primary narrator recounts what a woman has told him.
During their Parisian encounter, Bénédicte Ombredanne confides about her private life: L’Amour et les forêts is therefore her own story, whose driving force is the marital couple she forms with a manipulative and violent man, easily identified by the reader as a narcissistic pervert. At the heart of the narrative, the reader glimpses at Bénédicte Ombredanne’s escape, a single escape into the arms of Christian, a wonderful lover, residing in the Vosges forests, who tenderly welcomes her and allows her to perceive the possibility of happiness. However, dependent and subjugated, Bénédicte Ombredanne, the ideal victim of the narcissistic pervert, returns home, confesses her infidelity and suffers the relentless anger of the cheated spouse, because a narcissistic pervert does not love, nor does he understand or empathize. Instead, he possesses, harasses, destroys.
Towards the end of the narrative, the reader follows Bénédicte Ombredanne’s admittance to the psychiatric ward after her illness and the degradation of her state, and the drama culminates with her death. This part of the story is told by the narrative voice of her twin sister, because it is far too late for the victim to continue assuming the role of the storyteller of her own life.
Undoubtedly, the narrative centers around the dialectical apprehension of the pervert and his victim: on one hand, the seduction, the grip, the harassment, the tightening of the noose, the debasement, and the annihilation; and on the other, the entrapment, the emotional dependency, the confusion, the attraction to suffering, the guilt, the utter stupefaction leading to depersonalization. In this final stage, the physical death of Bénédicte Ombredanne could symbolically be approached as the mirror of mental death as her husband refuses to dress her remains in decent and beautiful clothing. The intersection point of the aforementioned dialectical apprehension is narcissism, originally fractured for the pervert, originally wounded for the victim. Ultimately, the integrity of the latter is somewhat restored, because the novelist continually names her in the narrative by her first and last name, as he affirmed in a conference given at the Mollat bookstore in Bordeaux on September 19th, 2014, and literature gives her back the light which she dangerously lacked.
The viewer enters Valérie Donzelli’s film in an entirely different way, precisely through light: a charming sunlit house by the sea, the landscape of the Nice promenade, twin sisters (true twins distinguishable by their haircuts, both characters played by Virginie Efira), one of whom is vivacious, good-natured, enterprising, while the other is grounded, discreet, somewhat melancholic, and barely recovered from a romantic disappointment. The latter embodies the heroine of Eric Reinhardt’s work.
This light is soon overshadowed when, having encountered a former classmate whom she once gently mocked for his corpulence, now a handsome man, the heroine allows herself to be seduced, accepts a marriage proposal, and the move to Metz (supposedly on the pretext of a professional transfer of her spouse, the deceit of which she will later discover) where, isolated from her family, torn from her landscape and element, she finds herself under the control of the narcissistic pervert and witnesses her life grow dark until it tips into horror and obscurity.
Her flight into the Vosges forests is also at the heart of the film: an entire phantasmagoria is brought to life in images, like a parallel reality, barely believable, a very brief moment of pure bliss at the end of which the heroine returns to her marital hell, to harassment, to violence up to the point of her attempted strangulation by the hands of the pervert, at the mercy of his madness.
The Liberties of the Silver Screen
Indeed, cinema is far from being the obedient offspring of literature! Far from necessarily being rebellious or oppositional, it is a mature medium which dares to take liberties with the literary text it brings to the screen.
In this vein, the director chooses to begin by establishing a sunlit, seaside past for the heroine and opts for a linear unfolding, even though the novelistic narrative begins in medias res and in full complexity. She equally elects to change the names of the central characters: Bénédicte Ombredanne becomes Blanche and Jean-François transforms into Grégoire Lamoureux (the irony of the surname is noted, a perfect antithesis of the love-incapable narcissist). A delightful crisscross between the novel and the film: in the former, the victim bears a highly suggestively onomastic name, whereas the pervert only has a first name (sufficient since he embodies the type of the narcissistic pervert), while in the latter, he has both a first name and a surname (a total tormentor), and the victim is reduced to a first name, connoting through its color purity, innocence (naivety?). The novelist, for his part, does not express any offense. Quite the contrary, in an interview with Augustin Trapenard, given at the Grande Librairie, he affirms having understood the need of the director, as well as the screenwriter, Audrey Diwan, to claim the narrative and to reinvigorate the characters according to their personal perception
Moreover, while the narrative adventures of Bénédicte Ombredanne’s life are indeed taken into account in the filmic narration (marriage, regional relocation, control, suffering, forest interlude, confession, harassment, etc.), the viewer (at least, the one who has read the novel) cannot but be very surprised by the turn of events. Indeed, in the psychiatric service, Blanche benefits from salvific compassion, listening, and understanding, her twin sister provides precious and very efficient aid, the episode of the pervert’s madness and the attempted murder by strangulation results in Blanche’s flight who, regaining her strength as if by miracle, manages to escape her tormentor, to hire a lawyer, and to initiate divorce proceedings. In fact, it results in utter stupefaction for the viewer, acquainted with the original work and, more so, psychologically astute!
Perhaps this discrepancy between the endings of the novel and the film is imbued with the director’s didactic intention, which might be conveying an edifying message: a victim can escape the narcissist, particularly through speech. This is what the nurse who is in charge of her case in the psychiatric service teaches Blanche: one must speak to be helped. This salvation likely falls in line with the #metoo movement which, since 2017, has been consistently demonstrating the possibility for all female victims of any kind of abuse to extricate themselves and regain their freedom and integrity. In this perspective, the film would carry a feminist apologetic dimension, while neglecting any concern for thematic coherence, whereas the novel subscribes to psychopathological logic (not to mention the fact that Éric Reinhardt claims to have written a fictionalized account of true and verified facts).
Regardless, the film is optimistic, it emerges from the darkness to reclaim hope, putting forth the idea that salvation is always possible. The novel, however, possesses only a single, tranquil sunlit glade in the midst of the dense forests of unconscious minds that attract and call to one another (the minds of the pervert and of his victim): Christian’s cabin (did he ever truly exist?), the span of a fleeting dream from which one awakens only to shatter one’s visage more thoroughly.
In Today’s World
In the present day, in light of what our societies, mostly governed by tyrants and narcissists, are experiencing, it is evident that the prevailing logic is fraught with morbid seduction, manipulation, sectarian indoctrination, pseudo-communication ideology supplanting true dialogue, violence of all sorts, etc. These ideas constitute a network of subjugations and alienations that, more often than not, structure our connections and lives. It thus appears impossible to escape their massive deployment since these tools of alienation are deeply committed to controlling behaviors, feelings, reactions, representations, and discourses. The pervert wields an all-encompassing influence.
This is why it is indeed difficult to embrace the cinematic resolution proposed by Valérie Donzelli (with no offense directed towards feminists or optimists). The ending functions like a fairy tale: it makes the adult beam with a naive smile, eliciting joy and satisfaction, all the while knowing that the real world differs vastly from the realm of tales.
And We, the Lebanese…
And we, the Lebanese? Are we Bénédicte Ombredanne, are we Blanche? Will we share the fate of the novel’s heroine? Will we experience the salvation of the film’s heroine? Or are we, on the contrary, Jean-François, Grégoire Lamoureux? Who among us is the psychopath, the narcissist? Who among us is the victim, manipulated, harassed, subjugated?
It is evident that these inquiries could not apply to our situation, nor to who we are. For we exist in full complexity, the very complexity which should refer us to the Pascaline thought that, in essence, “man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who wants to play the angel plays the beast.” On the Lebanese stage, we are neither in literature nor in cinema, we are in real life where “everything is fierce,” as stated by Pascal Quignard at the beginning of All the Mornings of the World.
