Dans quelle mesure l'adaptation cinématoraphique du roman "Un long dimanche de fiançailles" change-t-elle le cadre narratif ainsi que la manière de décrire les personnages et simplifie-t-elle l'histoire ?

Résumé du document

The adaptation in 2004 by Jean-Pierre Jeunet of the novel Un long dimanche de fiançailles written by Sébastien Japrisot and published in 1991 was awarded and nominated many times:
César 2005: 5 awards – 12 nominations
Oscars 2005: 2 nominations
Golden Globes: 1 nomination
BAFTA 2005: 1 nomination.

In a way, this can prove that the adaptation was very well appreciated by the public and by the ones who work in cinema. Yet, we should not be dazzled but rather try to study many aspect of this adaptation. Jean-Pierre Jeunet has worked with his co-scriptwriter of Amélie, Guillaume Laurant. According to the latter, the novel is very suspenseful and “the way Japrisot uses to lead us to the conclusion is very gripping.” After wondering if this was adaptable for cinema, they then wondered if
“[they would] be able to find again that subtle balance between this so luminous love story and that awful context. Because, what is beautiful in this novel, it's precisely the fact that the heroine's tenacity, will and faith outshine the horror of war.”
Besides, JP. Jeunet adds that “Japrisot's novel is a kind of thick thorny bush which in fact, hides a very simple plot. [Their] very first job has been to dismantle this ultra sophisticated mechanism, as we would do with an engine to understand how it works.”

Consequently, this essay will shed light on aspects of what occurred during the adaptation from the novel to the film, and more precisely on which are the changes in the narrative background and in the characterization.

Extraits

[...] Benoît Notre-Dame: in the novel, he is shown as some kind of brute, an antisocial person even referred to as ‘that man'. This aspect of his personality is not that obvious in the adaptation. In both media, he is said to have killed an officer of his company; however, in the movie, he drowns him in mud during a fight because that officer was used to kicking dead soldiers. Instead of this plausible explanation, the novel only says that he strangled him, without any obvious reason. [...]

[...] The music had to be romantic and a little sad at the same time. He also made the choice to have a voice-over who was reading quite the text from the novel. They tried to be as faithful as possible to it. Yet the simplification of the plot does not rely only on the visual and audio effects but also on other devices. III 3. Further into the plot As said before, the whole plot has been simplified. Some of the devices used have already been explained such as the loss of some nicknames and the elimination of some characters (Cf. [...]

[...] Psychologies of the characters While adapting Un long dimanche de fiançailles to cinema, Jean-Pierre Jeunet had first to work out the nature of each character. Yet, instead of being very faithful to the novel, he chose to take the liberty of changing some aspects in order to make it easier to transfer it to screen but also to make them more agreeable to the members of the audience. However, according to some critics, these alterations can make the film too “Amelian” adjective used to refer to the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amelie). [...]

[...] To sum up this part, we can say that the alterations in the characterization do not have a strong effect on the plot in itself but adds some moving or comic aspects in some protagonists' personalities. Yet, Mathilde's character is quite different as we said physically and psychologically. The elimination of some characters is also linked to the simplification of the plot which is the subject of the last part of this essay. III Simplification of the plot “Japrisot's novel is a kind of thick thorny bush which in fact, hides a very simple plot our very first job has been to dismantle this ultra sophisticated mechanism, as we would do with an engine to understand how it works.” This quotation of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant proves how hard the plot can be to understand. [...]

[...] Jeunet adds that “Japrisot's novel is a kind of thick thorny bush which in fact, hides a very simple plot. [Their] very first job has been to dismantle this ultra sophisticated mechanism, as we would do with an engine to understand how it works.”[4] Consequently, this essay will shed light on aspects of what occurred during the adaptation from the novel to the film, and more precisely on which are the changes in the narrative background and in the characterization. [...]