212. Czech directors Jan Kadar’s and Elmar Klos’ film “Touha zvaná Anada” (Adrift) (1971) (former Czechoslovakia): Third film of an important European film trilogy (based on a Hungarian novel by Lajos Zilahy), rarely discussed or appreciated

My heart pounds, my strength fails me; even the light has gone from my eyes.
--Psalms 38:10 (Epigraph/quote that opens the film, before the titles)

Adrift is the third film of a rarely discussed but important trilogy of director Jan Kadar (1918-79) that includes the Oscar-winning The Shop on the Main Street (1966) and The Angel Levine (1970). Elmar Klos was the co-director of two films of the trilogy: The Shop on the Main Street and Adrift.  Hence, the trilogy can conveniently be considered as the Jan Kadar spiritual trilogy on human beings’ tendency to lose things dear to them due to their own follies. In all the three films, the male central character is the pivot of the story and a major female figure dies as a result of the male character’s actions. As Kadar was a Jew, the references within the trilogy relate to the Old Testament of the Bible. (In contrast, the wife of the central character is an ardent Roman Catholic, with paintings of Mother Mary over her bed—a contribution of the novelist Lajos Zilahy.)

The mysterious Anada (Paula Pritchett) in the Danube

Unlike the spiritual doubt trilogy of the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman (The Silence; Through a Glass Darkly; Winter Light) and the spiritual/metaphysical Yusuf trilogy of the Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu (Honey; Milk; Egg) which are built on the original scripts of the respective directors, Kadar’s trilogy is made up of three adaptations of three novels by three different novelists, chosen either consciously or unconsciously by Kadar, to form the beads of a single necklace. The novelists are Ladislaw Grosman (The Shop on the Main Street), Bernard Malamud (The Angel Levine), and Lajos Zilahy (Adrift). Interestingly, Kadar’s Adrift is the third film adaptation of the same Zilahy novel.  A Hungarian film Something in the Water was made in 1944 and a Mexican film Something Floats in the Water was made in 1947, based on the same Hungarian novel. The novel ends with a miracle and a happy ending—Kadar’s film does not.

The fisherman -- the good and the bad in us

The tale of Adrift (and the novel from which the screenplay was adapted) is simple. A rural family of a poor fisherman (Rade Markovic) on the banks of the Danube River consists of a religious wife Zuzka (Milena Dravic), their teenage son and the fisherman’s father-in-law.  A beautiful woman (Paula Pritchett) with no family or known history and a strange name Anada is found floating in the river, presumably dead. The wife notices a spot of life in the body and massages her back to life. The film is all about the consequent impact of her presence in the family household at the insistence of the wife.

Anada (Paula Pritchett): Is she real ,or a mermaid ,
or a mere figment of imagination 

More than the plot, it is the filmmaking that grabs the attention of an intelligent viewer as in all Kadar films more than the subject. The beginning and the end of the film are considerably similar, with parallel events. It could easily confuse an inattentive viewer. The consequence of the actions of the fisherman is never shown, only inferred by visuals that need to be connected by spoken lines earlier in the film.

Kadar’s Adrift uses methods similar to those used in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise (2016) where the principal characters are answering questions on their motives and actions. In Paradise you do not see the questioner; in Adrift you see three male questioners who never reveal much about themselves except their names (Melchior, Balthazar and Kaspar) while reassuring the fisherman that they are not the police. In both films, the timing of the questioning would seem illogical until the end of the film when the seemingly illogical chronology falls into place.  The three names will give away their true identities, if the viewer is well read. These names are attributed to the three wise men that came to see baby Jesus in Bethlehem. These names do not appear in the New Testament of the Bible but emerged from a Greek manuscript written in the 6th Century AD. The Catholic Church canonised these men into Saints Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar. It is not surprising that the strange trio in the film talks of attending christenings, weddings or wakes and finding a birth or a death.  Their boat has a flag flying on it—it is a simple black one.

Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar "interrogate" the adrift fisherman

Some parts of the “interrogation” are revealing. When the three men meet the fisherman for the first time, when he is waking up on the banks of the Danube after having been “adrift,” they ask him if he remembers anything, to which he replies “I remember nothing.”  One of the three men responds: “When things go wrong you remember nothing.”  Later one of the mysterious three asks the fisherman about Anada: “Did you interrogate her?” The fisherman’s angry retort is “Who are you to interrogate me?” More revealing than the religion in Adrift, are the words and actions of the fisherman that reveal turmoil and contradictions within the fisherman’s simple mind, which is indeed “adrift.”  The trio reassures the fisherman “We only know what you know.”

When asked by the trio why he let Anada stay with his family, the fisherman’s honest reply is “My wife wanted it ...” only to add on the words “I love my wife.” He goes on “... My wife’s stupidity.” The trio quickly corrects him “You mean kindness.”

The wife Zuzka (Milena Dravic) embodiment of kindness reminisces
as her husband prepares her medicine 

Truth and duplicity intermingle in Adrift.  (Kadar seems to love this strange mix—exemplified in his lovely adult “children’s film” Lies My Father Told Me, a 1975 film he made in Canada.) Early in the film Adrift, the wife Zuzka reveals that she remembers that her husband had revealed his love for her by stating that he would drown himself if she died following childbirth. Fortunately, she and her son had survived the childbirth. More than a decade later, when she falls seriously ill, as a devout Catholic, she pledges all the money the poor family has to God if she is cured for the sake of her husband and son. This why the words “stupidity” and “kindness” during the interrogation sequence takes on an added significance.

The women Zuzka (right) and Anada (left)
understand each other, which upsets the fisherman even further

Kadar’s films have a style that remains with you—the sudden use of music during certain types of activity, which stops as suddenly as it begins. His camera tells you the end of the tale as though it was a silent interloper. If you miss the important shots, the end of the film would indeed befuddle the viewer.

After the end of the film the viewer could reflect on the epigraph at the beginning of the film, though most casual viewers might not see the importance of that exercise.  Both Kadar and Konchalovsky are erudite directors who believe epigraphs and end quotes add more value for the serious and well-read viewer.

Kadar’s films are gems for viewers who pay attention to details. He is definitely one of the best Czech/Slovak filmmakers in film history. The three films in the trilogy are important for students of cinema, even though rarely discussed in recent times.

P.S. The film Adrift won the Best Actress award at the Taormina Film Festival for Milena Dravic who plays Zuzka, the wife. Kadar’s The Shop on the Main Street won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language film and an unsuccessful nomination for the Best Actress Oscar. Andrei Konchalovsky's Paradise (2016) has been reviewed on this blog earlier.

211. US director Sofia Coppola’s film “The Beguiled” (2017) (USA): An interesting but “amputated” female perspective of a quaint but intelligent American novel

It is imperative that when a director adapts a novel into a film that one ought to compare how that effort changes or enhances the entertainment of the viewer/reader. That exercise is further compounded if an interesting earlier film had been made—making it useful to compare the three creative products—the novel, the original movie and the remake.

The Union Corporal (Colin Farrell) and Alicia (Elle Fanning) 

Sofia Coppola’s film The Beguiled is an adaptation of a novel and a remake of a 1971 film of considerable importance. Ms Coppola won the Best Director award at Cannes in 2017 from a jury that did not use that perspective but merely evaluated its strengths compared to the 20 odd films in competition at that edition of the Festival. 

The tale is set during the American civil war. An injured Union soldier is given refuge in a seminary/boarding school in a southern Confederate state inhabited by religious women/girls of varying ages. A series of unfortunate incidents lead to his death. 

Sofia Coppola is the director and screenplay writer of 2017 version of The Beguiled. Her approach to the film's subject is simple, obvious, and measured —while retaining the basic story of the novel, she would tweak it to serve us a female perspective of the novel. (Note that even the color of the film's title on poster is pink!) The original novel was written by a male author Thomas Cullinan. The original screenplay was written by Albert Maltz and Irene Kemp for the original film The Beguiled (1971), directed by Don Siegel. Ms Coppola uses that screenplay of Maltz and Kemp as the basis of her own adapted screenplay, while changing crucial elements of the preceding works. 

The not-so-frail Ms Martha (Nicole Kidman) in candle light

The crucial differences of the remake with the original film are the following:

1.  The total deletion of the sympathetic black slave girl Mattie of the novel renamed Hallie in the original film by Don Siegel. In the original film. Hallie in a crucial scene during the second leg operation, courageously remarks “There is frailty in you” as Ms Martha (played by Geraldine Page) avoids looking at the face of the soldier. In Ms Coppola’s version, there is very little frailty in Ms Martha (played by Nicole Kidman). Further, both the original version and the remake of The Beguiled portray the character of Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman in the original, and Kirsten Dunst in the remake) as a white lady, while the character in the novel is of a mixed race.
2.  The soldier’s character and his views are reduced to the minimal in Ms Coppola’s version allowing very little sympathy to develop in the viewer's mind  for the soldier. 
3. The sexual encounter sequence is minimized in screen time in Ms Coppola’s version to the credit of the director, when compared to the original version. In any case, that sequence is not important. 
4. The cinematography in the night sequences is captured in candle light in Ms Coppola’s version (as it ought to be) unlike Mr Siegels’ version. It reminds one of the cinematography and lighting in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon (1975). 
5. The trees and the woods in Ms Coppola’s version are spectacular compared to Mr Siegel’s version. Even the fallen dried leaves in the veranda add to the intelligent details adopted in Ms Coppola’s version. 
6. In Ms Coppola’s version, the soldier’s body is left unattended outside the gate in a covered body bag, which is odd indeed. In Mr Siegel’s version the ladies carry the covered body far away from their mansion. One can assume the ladies were not capable of digging a grave in both film versions leading to this action. 

Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) replaces the Edwina of mixed race of the novel

Religion and reality of the beguiled

The following is the intelligent and measured text of a statement issued by Ms Coppola to counter some criticism of her omissions in her version: 

 “My film is set in a Southern school for girls at the point in the Civil War when the men had been away fighting for some time and the Union had gained momentum. According to historians and several women’s journals from the time, many slaves had departed, and a great number of white women of the South were left in isolation, holding on to a world whose time had rightly come to an end—a world built on slave labor.” 

 “I wanted to tell the story of the isolation of these women, cut off from the world and in denial of a changing world. I also focused on how they deal with repression and desire when a man comes in to their abandoned world, and how this situation affects each of them, being at different stages of their life and development. I thought there were universal themes, about desire and male and female power dynamics that could relate to all women.” 

“The circumstances in which the women in my story find themselves are historically accurate—and not a distortion of history, as some have claimed. From “Mothers of Invention” by Drew Gilpin Faust: “War and emancipation revealed that many white women felt themselves entirely ignorant about how to perform basic functions of everyday life…A war that had at the outset made so many women feel useless and irrelevant soon demanded significant labor and sacrifice from even the most privileged southern females…” 

 “Throughout the film, we see students and teachers trying to hold on to their crumbling way of life. Eventually, they even lock themselves up and sever all ties to the outside world in order to perpetuate a reality that has only become a fantasy. My intentions in choosing to make a film in this world were not to celebrate a way of life whose time was over, but rather to explore the high cost of denial and repression.” 

 “There have been some questions regarding my approach to my new film, The Beguiled. More specifically, there have been objections to my decision not to include the slave character, Mattie, in Thomas Cullinan’s book on which my film is based. I would like to clarify this.” 

 “My film is set in a Southern school for girls at the point in the Civil War when the men had been away fighting for some time and the Union had gained momentum. According to historians and several women’s journals from the time, many slaves had departed, and a great number of white women of the South were left in isolation, holding on to a world whose time had rightly come to an end—a world built on slave labor." 

"Isolation of women, repression and desire" captured
by Sofia Coppola

 “I wanted to tell the story of the isolation of these women, cut off from the world and in denial of a changing world. I also focused on how they deal with repression and desire when a man comes in to their abandoned world, and how this situation affects each of them, being at different stages of their life and development. I thought there were universal themes, about desire and male and female power dynamics that could relate to all women.” 

“In his 1966 novel, Thomas Cullinan made the choice to include a slave, Mattie, as a side-character. He wrote in his idea of Mattie’s voice, and she is the only one who doesn’t speak proper English—her voice is not even grammatically transcribed.” 

“I did not want to perpetuate an objectionable stereotype where facts and history supported my choice of setting the story of these white women in complete isolation, after the slaves had escaped. Moreover, I felt that to treat slavery as a side-plot would be insulting.” 

“There are many examples of how slaves have been appropriated and “given a voice” by white artists. Rather than an act of denial, my decision of not including Mattie in the film comes from respect.” 

 “Some have said that it is not responsible to make a film set during the Civil War and not deal directly with slavery and feature slave characters. I did not think so in preparing this film, but have been thinking about this and will continue to do so. But it has been disheartening to hear my artistic choices, grounded in historical facts, being characterized as insensitive when my intention was the opposite”. 

“I sincerely hope this discussion brings attention to the industry for the need for more films from the voices of filmmakers of color and to include more points of views and histories.” 

Exterior cinematography under natural light
with dried leaves on the floor

Both the film versions have their strengths and weaknesses. Both films and the novel compare the importance given to religion and the contrarian actions of the persons who profess to practice it. Both films and the novel discuss how good individuals change with circumstances that affect their ego or their possessions. Even a child can change if it's pet is deliberately hurt! Don Siegel’s 1971 version captures a larger canvas of male characters (soldiers of the Confederate army interacting with the ladies)---several brief yet important sequences. Ms Coppola’s version avoids those distractions as she is more interested in focussing on the ladies. Both versions have their strengths. Don Siegel’s 1971 version gave importance to acting, while Ms Coppola’s somewhat notable version is essentially a director’s, the art director's and cinematographer’s film--little else. Despite directorial maturity of the remake, the original is the winner with a notable Clint Eastwood performance to boot.