L'ennui: Adapt or die

DIRECTED BY Cédric Kahn, 1998

STARRING Sophie Guillemin (Cécilia), Charles Berling (Martin), Arielle Dombasle (Sophie)

CLASSIFICATION 18

RUN TIME117 mins, Artificial Eye

LANGUAGE French

COVER QUOTE 'A tale of enigmatic sexual obsession… dynamic and fascinating' - Time Out

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT I've always been underwhelmed by the work of writer Alberto Moravio, though much of it has been adapted for cinema, not least in The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) and Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963). What's astounding about this adaptation is how true it is to the source novel, La Noia (1960), down to the casting of the astonishing Sophie Guillemin, who stars opposite Gérard Depardieu in Jean Becker's trite My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010), which opens in UK cinemas this Friday. L'ennui was her film debut; she was nominated for the French film César awards for it and her follow up Harry, He's Here to Help (Dominik Moll, 2000) - both times in the most promising actress category.

THE PLOT Cruising a red light district, philosophy professor Martin spots an older man and a young woman fighting; the girl leaves and Martin discovers the man is a painter called Meyers. When Martin goes to visit Meyers in the latter's studio he is told Meyers died, while making love, and Martin encounters the woman, Cécilia. They begin a primarily sexual affair, exacerbated by Cécilia's infuriating calm and apparent lack of interest in anything but the most tangible experience ('I'm well so why worry about death') and Martin's jealousy, made worse when he discovers she is seeing an actor of her own age.

In the grip of breakdown, Martin takes sick leave from his job, and to dumping his news and emotions on his ex wife, Sophie. Finally, Martin starts giving Cécilia large amounts of money and asks her to marry him in an effort to preserve the relationship. She decides to leave on holiday with her boyfriend; Martin picks up a prostitute, imagining she is Cécilia, and crashes the car he is driving, with her in it. He wakes in hospital and asks the nurse to help him write a letter to Sophie in which he says he no longer has suicidal thoughts.

THE FILM Whole chunks of dialogue are lifted verbatim from the book La noia for the film L'ennui, and much more besides. Director Cédric Kahn does make a few tweaks, which I'll come to, but Sophie Guillemin, who was barely out of her teens when the film was made, is the absolute embodiment of Moravia's source novel.

In the book (I'll refer to Angus Davidson's translation for the New York Review Books version), the physique of her character, Cécilia, when first encountered, is described thus: 'She had a round face like a child; but it was a child that had grown too hastily and been initiated too soon into the experiences of womanhood. She was pale, with a slight shadow underneath her cheekbones which made her cheeks look hollow, and a mass thick, brown, curly hair all around her face. Her small mouth, childish both in shape and expression, reminded one of a bud that had withered prematurely on the bough without opening, and its corners were marked by two thin furrows... Finally her eyes, her best feature, were large and dark...'

The male narrator - Dino in the book, Martin onscreen - thinks she is no more than 15 years old (in the film she states explicitly that she is 17, though she has been in an affair for two years already) but is fooled by her figure, which he takes to be slender and childish but proves to be voluptuous. 'She had in fact a magnificent bosom, full, firm and brown, which did not, however seem in harmony with her torso - the slender, thin torso of an adolescent girl...' Guillemin mimics her walk, bosom thrust forward and belly pulled back, and the voice 'strangely expressionless, dry, precise'; she undresses, tramps on her skirt, even wipes herself vigorously with a towel after pissing, precisely as described by Moravia.

Martin's manner is immediately insistent with Cécilia, asking her extremely intimate questions, usually about her relationship with the painter Meyers. Martin is blunt: 'You don't seem to be the kind of woman to inspire a grand passion... to destroy a man.' Little does he know. Cécilia is impulsive in her attraction towards Martin: 'You're offering yourself as an object,' he tells her.

Cécilia is always ready for sex; she begins undressing the moment she enters his flat. 'Her only means of expression is sexual,' Martin complains to his ex wife. 'Sometimes, when she's lying there, legs apart, I find her cunt more expressive than her mouth.'

It is at the moment he decides to break with Cécilia that Martin becomes more interested in her: she misses an appointment for the first time, and it emerges she's seeing someone else. (There's a very strange scene where he follows Cécilia and her new boyfriend, Momo, almost under their noses; later he complains she didn't see him.) There is something of a dialectician manqué about Cécilia: when Martin asks her if she would continue to see him if he didn't have money she says she has already done so; she's not religious - 'If someone doesn't consider something then it doesn't exist.' Religion is, like so many other things, including aspects of her relationship with Meyers, dull, boring.

There are oddities in their romance: their last interaction is the first time we see them kiss passionately, otherwise Cécilia tends to just give Martin a peck on the cheek; they are only shown having straight sexual intercourse - when Martin picks up a prostitute who reminds him of Cécilia at the end of the film he demands a blow job. When he rings a man with whom he believes Cécilia is having an affair he demands: 'Does she give good head?' Her secrecy and infidelity are clearly not the only issues for Martin.

Kahn changes his central male character's profession from painter to philosophy professor - an alteration that gives some scenes the feel of Arnaud Desplechin's excellent Ma vie sexuelle (1996), including a very funny rant about Freud - and Dino's mother is replaced by an ex wife for Martin. As in Kahn's Red Lights (2004), adapted from the novel by Georges Simenon, it is the new scenes that sit least well in L'ennui, which is imbued with some of the thriller aspects of the other, later, film.

Finally it is Cécilia's apparent passivity that sends Martin mad: as they go to bed one afternoon he, deliberately, cruelly, asks her to first close the curtains, then a door, then to fetch his cigarettes, to check whether he's turned the gas off in the kitchen... It is played in the film exactly as described on paper. Sexually, Dino decides in the book, she 'had no feeling, and possibly even, no real sensuality, but merely a sexual appetite of which she herself was not entirely conscious although she submitted passively to its urgency.'

KEY SCENES Chapter 6, 27:21 Cécilia and Martin are seen having sex for the first time: she is shown in bed naked from behind, on top of Martin.

Chapter 9, 47:02 The couple have furious sex on the edge of the bed, this time with Martin on top. 'It was wonderful today,' says Cécilia, holding up three fingers to show the number of orgasms she had. Afterwards he ahs her again, standing up in the hallway.

Chapter 19 1:42:40 In a gaudy hotel room, the couple have sex for the last time in a variety of positions.

FURTHER VIEWING L'ennui is so fruitful due to the many other avenues of investigation it opens, not least those other adaptations of Moravia I mention at the beginning of this post, by Bertolucci and Godard. There are, too, those films featuring the remarkable Guillemin; Harry... is a very enjoyable film, German director Moll's best so far. Guillemin stands out as the best thing by far in My Afternoons... (originally titled La tête en friche), although there is a sense she may have been cast - as Depardieu's young lover - purely because of the sexual resonance with her character in L'ennui (it's very difficult to understand their relationship on any other terms).

There is, too, Red Lights, another dramatic depiction of male frustration, starring Jean-Pierre Darroussin and the icy Carole Bouquet. And, if you want to delve further into recent Simenon adaptations in a similar vein, you could check out Pierre Jolivet's In All Innocence (1998), starring Bouquet, again, alongside Gérard Lanvin, new favourite Guillaume Canet and the stunning Virginie Ledoyen (the last two going on to appear together in The Beach, 2000).

KEY QUOTE 'You're lying, that girl [Cécilia] doesn't exist!' - Sophie