|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Private Fears In Public Places: Adaptations In Other Media |
|||
|
Film (2006)
World Premiere: 2 September 2006 Director: Alain
Resnais > Availability: DVD (region 1 / region 2) |
Character: > In the original play: Thierry is Stewart Lionel is Ambrose Gaelle is Imogen > |
Actor: > > > . . . |
To find out more about Coeurs, click here |
|
Articles On The Film Adaptation Of Private Fears In Public Places |
|||
|
Extracts From An Interview With Alain Resnais by Francine Thomas
I've been a fan of Alan Ayckbourn's plays since 1972. I like his plot constructions, manipulation of time and conception of directing which gives the imagination pride of place.
What struck me first when I read Private Fears in Public Places was the characters' constant determination to shake off their solitude, with all the obstacles that implies. The sense of solitude is irreversible. There's no cure for the desire not to be alone. It's the eternal quest for happiness. It's easy to believe it's within your grasp and hard to accept that it is a figment of your imagination.
With Private Fears in Public Places, I realized that I could take an opposite track compared to Smoking and No Smoking. In both those films, which were a declaration of my love of England, I pushed attention to detail to fanatical extremes, by ensuring that all the props and costumes were as English as possible, and by recording, for example, the church bells and seagulls in the small Yorkshire town which provided the backdrop. This time, we were dealing with a typically London play, which offered the possibility of transposing it to Paris. It occurred to me that the equivalent of the new London setting was the rapidly expanding district around Bercy, the Avenue de France and the new National Library with its very singular light. Also, it's a neighborhood that fits in well with a modern-day story about real estate brokers and their clients.
I asked Jean-Michel Ribes to write the French dialogue. It seemed to me that he was close to Ayckbourn, that he could understand how his brain worked. Like Ayckbourn, not only has he written a large number of plays, but he is also a phenomenally dynamic director and artistic director of a theatre. In Musee haut, musee bas, to take just one example, there is a kind of drift into madness that one also finds in Ayckbourn. And I like his Alphonse Allais side. Unlike Smoking and No Smoking, where we had to squeeze eight plays into two films, we couldn't cut anything out this time. The writing is very sparing. As soon as you lose one line, you sense it's missing. The screenplay is very faithful to the play but it is as French as Ayckbourn is English, especially in all the nuances of everyday spoken language. We had to find a delicate balance: keeping the characters' feelings without replicating the English mindset or imitating the rhythm of spoken English.
The great challenge when you have around fifty scenes, some of which are very short, is to get across the perpetual interactions between the seven characters, even though some of them never meet. The relationships between the characters remind me of a spider's web draped between two gorse bushes and covered in dew by the night. Thierry, Charlotte, Gaelle, Dan, Nicole, Lionel and Arthur are like insects struggling to break free of a trap. Each time one of them moves, it impacts on another part of the web and on another character, therefore, who may have no links whatsoever to the first.
Copyright: Francois Thomas
Differences Between The Film And The Play by Simon Murgatroyd
Just One Word... The film Coeurs is possibly the most faithful adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn play ever to be filmed. The translated dialogue is lifted almost wholesale from the original script and has been very sympathetically handled where it needed to be altered. Yet there is one subtle difference if you were to see the play and the film, so small you might even miss it; it is just one word, yet its significance with regard to the character of Ambrose (Lionel in the film) is immeasurable and has a dramatic effect on both our understanding of the character and the plot of the play. In the film, the dialogue reads as:
Ambrose: Ours was a good relationship and well worth pursuing and we got together again and never looked back. Dan: And lived happily ever after. Ambrose: Happily, yes. Sadly not ever after. Dan: No? She walked out again did she? Ambrose: No. She died.
In the play, the final line actually reads as:
Ambrose: No. They died.
Just one word: “She” being altered from “they” alters Ambrose’s character and our perception of him. In the play, this oblique reference offers an insight into why his relationship with his father, as explained to Charlotte, is so troubled. Come the final scene between Ambrose and Charlotte, the implication Ambrose is gay is strengthened when she sees the photograph.
Charlotte: The photograph on the sideboard. The one with you and that other young man, was that your brother? Ambrose: No, no. Just a friend. He’s dead now. Charlotte: Oh, I’m sorry.
The photograph is a minor detail which adds so much weight to Ambrose’s character. Taken in the context of the film, the exchange above is redundant small-talk and doesn’t infer anything - given we have been told his partner was female. But in the play, not only do we perceive Ambrose and his relationship with his father in a different light, but it affects our response to the final scene between him and Charlotte. In this scene, Ambrose reports how his father has apparently hallucinated Charlotte dancing naked at the end of his bed. Charlotte and Ambrose then talk about Charlotte’s faith and as she leaves she hands him a video; Charlotte has previously given Stewart at the office a video which has a faith-based programme recorded over a pornographic film, possibly involving Charlotte. What brings a wry smile to the face at the end of the movie as we infer what Charlotte is giving him, becomes a bit more disturbing in the play. Given that the audience is aware, unlike Charlotte, of Ambrose’s sexuality, the consequences - left to the audience to imagine - will be presumably quite different in the audience‘s mind to how they would be viewed in the film. This one word changes so much and yet it is not even a deliberate change, but all down to a proof-reading error. When the script was given to the publisher Faber to include as part of the collection Alan Ayckbourn: Plays 3, the word was innocently altered during proof-reading and the mistake never spotted. The play was published with the error and this recently published version was used by Jean-Michel Ribes as the basis for his screenplay. Not until it was too late was the error spotted and by then it was too late to alter. Realistically, it does not affect the film as within the play it is a very subtle piece of character background and, by this point in the film, Resnais has preceded these lines with the striking scene of the conversation between Ambrose and Charlotte with snow falling around them in the kitchen. The difference is worth noting though, although the impact of this very much depends on the actor and director. In the original version, Ambrose’s line to Dan was barely emphasised and almost thrown away leaving it for the audience to pick up; were the line to be emphasised or made explicit, it would almost certainly ruin one of the nicest subtleties of the play.
The Snow Scene: “I suppose we pass through life alone” The other major difference between the play and the film, accepting the change of location from London to Paris, is the final scene between Ambrose (Lionel in the film) and Charlotte. Alain Resnais chooses to set the film in a snow-bound Paris with the snow punctuating the many scenes of the film. In what is the penultimate scene of the play (scene 52), the two characters discuss Lionel’s father in the kitchen sat at a table. As the conversation moves from Lionel’s father’s apparent ‘hallucinations’ of Charlotte dancing naked to what Lionel will do with his life, Charlotte asks “Will you cope?” (1hr 49mins on the DVD) her hand moves to his and suddenly the table is covered in snow, snow falling in the room and the sound of the winter wind can be heard throughout the following scene. This continues until Charlotte announces she must go. The characters stand and the snow has vanished replaced with the expected view of the kitchen. During the dialogue, there are several notable cuts to the original dialogue beginning with Thierry admitting he can’t accept the concept of Heaven and Hell.
This is replaced by the eloquent and simple: “I suppose we pass through life alone.” The alteration in no way betrays the original intention and serves to highlight what Resanis has chosen above all to emphasise throughout the film, the loneliness and alienation of these character’s lives - given Lionel says this with snow falling around him, it is quite a bleak statement. Intriguingly Charlotte is then made slightly more ambiguous - quite difficult already considering she is the most ambiguous and complex of the characters. In the original play, Charlotte declares that a hell-fire burns in all of us and it’s up to us if we allow it to spread and consume us, at which:
Ambrose (lightly) What even you, Charlotte? Charlotte: Oh, Ambrose, you have no idea. You’ve no idea at all what’s within me. (rising). I must go.
In the film, Lionel’s question is met by a pause and “I must go.” Whilst again not altering the intention of the playwright or the original script, it adds a certain ambiguity to Charlotte and her intentions - specifically with regard to the video cassettes she gives out. The use of snow in the movie, whatever the metaphorical purpose - be it to show how these characters are cut off or the essential coldness of their lives or whatever interpretation the viewer chooses to see, is obviously significant to Resnais. It also helps define this as a film - in an otherwise extraordinarily faithful adaptation of Ayckbourn’s play, the snow which separates the scenes and the character’s lives is totally cinematic and gives the film a distinctive visual identity. The deeper meaning and purpose of it though, particularly with regard to the scene discussed, must always remain with the viewer to decide.
Copyright: Simon Murgatroyd 2009
Alan Ayckbourn’s Thoughts On The Film
Alan Ayckbourn has always had a high regard for Alain Resnais from the moment when Alan first met the French director at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round in 1989 and it transpired Alain Resnais was a fan of the playwright’s work. Resnais successfully adapted Alan’s epic play Intimate Exchanges into the two films Smoking / No Smoking and Alan has frequently repeated Alain’s view that Alan makes movies for the stage whereas Alain makes plays for the movies. Of all the filmed adaptations of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays, it can be strongly argued that Coeurs and Smoking / No Smoking are by far and away the strongest and the most faithful; that even where they may deviate from the plays, the movies always carry the spirit of the play and are faithful to the playwright’s intentions. On the UK DVD release of Private Fears In Public Places, Alan Ayckbourn is interviewed and briefly talks about the film and his thoughts on it and Alain Resnais.
“I was immediately taken by the snow storm which I thought was typically him. There was no snow-storm on stage obviously...When the camera came in on that long track through to the first apartment, we started right at the beginning of the play and give or take the odd line, the scene was very much as it was. And then he did another dissolve through the snow into the following scene and it just unravelled in that way. Scene followed scene and to the best of my memory there weren't any scenes out of order but it became an incredibly French experience, none the less. He’s a great director and will inevitable take a script that’s laid out quite geometrically , which he respected I think, and try to observe and put his own stamp on it. So I was partly walking my own path but I was in another world. The French world. I love the moment in the film, which is not in the stage play, obviously, when their hands meet at the table and they’re suddenly outside in the snow. It’s most peculiar and it takes you absolutely by surprise. But he works in a terribly theatrical way I think the thing about Alain is he knows why something’s there. He may question why it’s there, but he acknowledges it’s there for a purpose. So if he does remove something, it’s always in order to make something in his version a little clearer; never to just get it moving. His pacing of the film is very similar and I think Alain also uses his camera work specifically to tell the story. Although we both get quite oblique occasionally , we are in the end narrative merchants…. One loves to see one’s work through other people's eyes, but only when they’re eyes that have a genuine affection for the work.” Copyright: Alan Ayckbourn |
|||
|
If you have enquiries about this play or any other aspect of this website, please contact the administrator at: admin@alanayckbourn.net. |
|||
