John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose, 1903
(March 27) Decorno, such a great lover of Italy, recommended the movie Enchanted April as a way to take a virtual trip there (this plus several others) and I watched it and loved it.... the tears streamed down my face at the end (and even earlier on)... it's touching and sweet, a delight... and bit Abraham-Hicks actually!!... all against this beautiful Italian background of a medieval castle flanked by gardens and the sea.I liked it so well I wanted to read the novel it was based on, which was super easy to do since it's a Gutenberg Project book... and it was such a lovely read that I finished it in about a day and a half.
It was really lovely, but it was kind of shock as well, since the movie took a number of liberties with the story that make it completely different, and yet the overall effect is exactly right somehow.
Off the bat, the different colouring of all the main characters was superficially disorienting... in the movie, Rose Arbuthnot is played by Miranda Richardson as a pale strawberry blonde who does look like the Madonna in a painting hanging in San Salvatore, but, in the book, Rose is supposed to be dark-haired and dark-eyed. Movie!Lotty is the dark-haired and -eyed one, but in the book is supposed to be fair and ginger-haired and gets more freckled with every day at San Salvatore.
Meanwhile, the movie's Lady Caroline is a dark-haired Cleopatra of a flapper, perfectly gorgeous and sultry, whereas the original, in the book, is as blond and fair and radiant as a human being can get, all of which Von Arnim meant as important symbolism, for sure.
But none of this takes away from the emotional effect of the story -- the movie still captures that insightfully.
What is a little more jarring is to find out that the book relationship between Lady Caroline and Mr. Briggs has quite a different dynamic than the movie presents -- the movie really dismantles and rebuilds that subplot, and makes more sense of it, maybe.
What was a great pleasure when reading the book was to see how comic the story was meant to be. There is the greatest scene in the book of the two non-Italian-speaking women being ushered around by the men from San Salvatore and not being quite sure they weren't being robbed and murdered, and having a long conversation with the men as they're led about that consists only of "Si, San Salvatore" said back and forth to each other in varying tones of hope, doubt, fear and bravado for several suspenseful pages, and it's quite hilarious.
The scene of Mellersh meeting Lady Caroline in a towel is also deftly gut-splitting.
The movie for some reason did not play up these comic scenes... but maybe it's because you need to know so much of what is going on in the character's heads to enjoy the humour... and, indeed, the movie used a lot of voice-overs to help us understand the characters' motivations... a sign of a very "interior" novel???... but strangely, a lot of the voice-over thinking was done by Lady Caroline, to completely revamp and rationalize her character, and major changes were made to Mr. Briggs to nicely co-ordinate with that revamping.
The best part of both the movie and the book is the way it dawns on them all that love is the answer to all problems, and how they all blossom and come to true happiness, one by one. It's just all so lovely.
It... the movie-book concept... was one of those things that is unexpectedly delightful -- I mean, I expected some delight gorging on Italy, but it was unexpectedly super-delightful -- it was not just a pretty trip to a beautiful place but a deep dive into what happiness is. Sigh.
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