Allyson Hallman: Death and the Maiden

     Literature and film are not the same medium. It sounds obvious, but so many people (definitely including myself) forget that. Because they are not the same medium, they cannot tell the same story in the same way. To quote John Green, "Movie adaptations are not, and should not attempt to be, visualizations of a novel. They are movies. They need different kinds of structure, and different metaphors* and different ways of expressing thoughts and ideas because you’re moving from text to the visible/audible world." But it's difficult to not criticize a film because it's not 100% like the book. Every reader--as Katherine and Jessica have both mentioned--creates a different version of the book in their mind, and movies cannot satisfy every reader who sees the movie.

     John Green wrote The Fault in Our Stars, published in 2012, and that book's movie adaptation just recently wrapped up filming and will be released next year. John was heavily involved in writing the screenplay and the filming process, throughout which he posted updates on Twitter. At one point, he mentioned that almost every single line of dialogue from his book is being used in the movie, but other aspects of the movie are not exactly like the book because the book is so nuanced that the movie cannot capture everything perfectly. I share this attitude towards film adaptations of books, but at the same time, I love the film adaptation of Death and the Maiden, and the film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist was kind of eh for me.

     I love the film adaptation of Death and the Maiden because it was made very similarly to how the TFiOS movie seems to have been produced; most of the dialogue from the book was used in the screenplay, along with some extra stuff, and the majority of the plot was captured well on screen but not exactly. Both Death and the Maiden and The Reluctant Fundamentalist--the books--have one major setting. The characters talk about and refer to past events, but the characters do not physically or drastically change locations for most of the book. I enjoyed how Polanski conveyed that one setting in Death and the Maiden, but I also liked that he added the cliff part to the movie because it made me root for Paulina even more, hoping she would just push Miranda off the cliff or even that Miranda would decide of his own volition to jump.
     On the other hand, I didn't really like how the film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist was made because of the flashbacks and the intense fight scenes with tons of jump cuts that seemed to butt heads with the peaceful environment the book created in my head. Reading the book, I knew that it would be difficult for Hollywood to create a faithful film adaptation that would be engaging--as films should be--because the book was just two characters in a cafe having a conversation. But in the film version, the director completely changed the personality and character of both Changez and Erica, and in my opinion, if you're going to try to make a movie based on such a loose, open book, the characters should be the aspect of the film that you keep as close to the book as possible. (See also: book Ginny Weasley vs. movie Ginny Weasley.)