Cousin Bette: The Movie

Some time ago I ran into the Des McAnuff film version of Honore de Balzac's classic Cousin Bette.

The novel is a sprawling soap opera, far too populous and tangled to be thoroughly and faithfully transformed into two-hour film. Naturally it is not so surprising that the cast of characters was very sharply reduced, with much tossed out altogether and much of the rest combined and compressed.

What was more surprising was that the film (despite being R-rated, with legitimately R-rated sex and nudity) comes off as tame next to the source material.

This is, partly, because of that reduction of the cast, which eliminated a good many possibilities (Adeline dies early on, Valerie de Marneffe receives but a single early mention, etc.), but also because the film's makers simply lacked old Balzac's audacity.

I think of such scenes as Valerie and her husband, who is quite content to use his wife's adulteries to wrangle promotions at work, and the four different lovers Valerie is leading on at the same time, each jealous of the others to the point of murder, sitting very civilly to breakfast together, each of the lovers smugly thinking to themselves that the child she is pregnant with was fathered by him and not the others, who unlike himself must surely be dupes for thinking the same thing.

Balzac manages to make it hilarious rather than simply ridiculous--and I suspect no filmmaker could pull that off now. The sheer technical virtuosity required to make something like that work apart, there is simply too little of Balzac's readiness to look unblinkingly at the seedy side of money, sex, obsession and the interaction of all these, certainly among those filmmakers who wish to go on being filmmakers--which should put the nonsense spouted by the self-proclaimed moralists about our times (and the self-satisfied edgelords, too) in perspective.