With the arrival of a film adaptation of Perfume, discussion of so-called ‘unfilmable’ novels is burgeoning. Here is Screenhead‘s list of the supposedly hardest novels to film, for example, and here a discussion from Time Out London. But the adaptability of a novel is only a problem if one somehow believes that the book and the film are in some sense the same thing; this is usually the same mindset whose grasp of a work of art goes no further than what it is ‘about’; in the case of narrative arts what story they tell and visual arts what they show.
I thought the twentieth century was all about art transcending the denotative and freeing us to have a more complicated reaction to a work of art, experiencing a complex and subtle interplay between what we think and feel in the encounter. We grasp this in Literature 101 and Film 101 early in our college education, it seems to me. The experience of reading a book and that of seeing a film, even if they have the same title and even the same plot, are intrinsically and irreconcilably distinct. (In fact, one might argue, so are two different film adaptations of the same story!)
A ‘faithful’ adaptation of a novel will become a ‘movie’, not a film, which an audience receives merely as a good yarn and whose reaction begins and ends with how ‘awesome’ it was or not.
Addendum: as a counterpoint, I just came across this line from a London Review of Books review of The Prestige, based on a novel I had enjoyed several years ago.
