Lately at the Salon – as pointed out during our NOW WE ARE SIX birthday bash – we have featured other forms of writing and creativity, as well as looking at some broader issues surrounding the arts. For this reason, our Festival musings from August included film and drama (and Fringe, as featured in our pre-party write-up.)
With visits this year from The Filmhouse and Film Festival it seemed right to take in some film. It also raises the question often posed in Salon blether: should you read the book first, or watch the film? In the case of the recent film, Poor Things, many didn’t know it was based on Alasdair Gray’s great book. The consensus: lavish and Oscar-worthy as the film was, the book was a must-read either way.
It’s likely Amy Liptrot’s prize-winning memoir, The Outrun, may be more familiar. Amy was a guest author at Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2022, and two years later returned to celebrate not only a film version, but a dramatization of her book. The latter was part of Edinburgh International Festival, and the film premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Before we come to this international triple-whammy, here are two other films we took in during Festival.
If To Kill a Wolf was based on anything, the obvious allusion is Little Red Riding Hood. Yet this film is not what it seems, and the adage of many a writer – ‘show, don’t tell’ – is well observed. When a young woman is found half-frozen in a forest in Oregon by someone already depicted as an outcast there is immediate tension. Neither character is willing to divulge to the other (or us) what led them to the current situation.
The film has ‘chapters’ whose titles (‘The Woodsman’, ’Grandma’, ’The Wolf’, ‘Red’) hint at the fairy tale but give little away. Instead, they signpost an alternative narrative which, as time winds backward, reveals why this 17-year-old runaway is less-than keen to return to her grandma, or aunt who she’s apparently fallen out with. It transpires the uncle is the big bad wolf, and the ‘Woodsman’ may need to rescue her a second time.
He too, more flashback reveals, has a difficult past to which he remains unreconciled. This is an ambitious first feature by director Kelsey Taylor that tackles difficult subjects. The pace of the later ‘chapters’ reveals more of the story, and yet the foreboding forest where the Woodsman finds the girl remains dark. This chance meeting may have unleashed some demons, but will either character escape their tormenters?
As in any good story, we are neither shown nor told: the imagination is more powerful than knowledge.
Another book receiving the film treatment was The Radleys. Given the genre it’s possible some won’t have read Matt Haig’s book, but where better to look than this review by an old Salon friend Keith Gray! It seems from reading about the book, that the adaptation (by Talitha Stevenson, developed by Jo Brand) serves the book well.
Instead of focusing on the usual horror tropes, it’s the suburban drudgery of a middle-class family (who happen to be vampires) trying to live a clean life that provides scope for humour. With Damien Lewis playing both characters of the respected GP and wayward twin brother (still practising his vampirical lifestyle) versus Kelly Macdonald’s frustrated book-club attending wife, there’s comic contrast too.
When the daughter discovers her blood-lust, the mother admits she’s “So fucking triggered!” Unfortunately, so is the son. If the ‘family secret’ isn’t that they’re adopted, he then asks, “Is this a metaphor?” In many ways it is. With the teenage boy already painted as a ‘freak’ he goes on to prove the case, although portraying him as gay is a strange diversion from the book. It does, however, provide him with the chance to innocently invite the object of his distant infatuation to “Go to the arcade, grab a bite.”
Sadly, the demonic uncle is also feeling peckish.
Each chapter of the book is headed with quotes from The Abstainer's Handbook to which the film can only allude, but the idea that vampire craving for fresh blood is a form of addiction made this film a smart choice in a festival that opened with The Outrun.
We return to Amy Liptrot, and the question, should the book should come first? What the film brings to The Outrun is a sense of realism, especially in the Orkney scenes which don’t shy away from the bleak weather and landscape. They also use Orcadian actors, including a few cameo appearances from Amy herself, once in a still shot holding her beach-find (a tiny porcelain bust called a ‘Frozen Alice’ apparently) which the film’s actor holds onto like a sacred keepsake.
Saoirse Ronan, who has brought many literary characters alive on screen, inhabits the part without trying to ‘be’ Amy. Using a name close to her surname – ‘Rona,’ also an anagram of director, Fingscheidt’s first name, Nora – Ronan makes the film her own, yet also universal. It allowed the author ‘psychological distance,’ though as Amy said at the Book Festival, since her own experience was so long ago, scenes from the film are more ‘visual’ now than her own memories!
Another storytelling style often associated with feminist narrative is the non-linear approach. As with the Wolf film, we are not shown everything in an orderly manner. A metaphor as strong as the ludicrous ‘13-steps’ in The Radleys, this idea serves to highlight the complex journey out of addiction, where time doesn’t always make sense. The ‘will she, won’t she’ tension remains even if we're all over the place chronologically.
The Book Festival conversation with playwright Stef Smith highlighted the differences between the film and play version of The Outrun. In this case, Stef achieved universality by calling the main character ‘woman’ – played with unexaggerated warmth by Isis Hainsworth. Drama can often focus on storytelling aspects, and this way another, new understanding emerges.
Some ‘scenes’ that didn’t make it into the film served dramatic purposes far better, and since the book has little ‘dialogue’ the use of a Greek Chorus (formed from the other characters) brought added commentary. It also brought music, with ostinatos in both words and rhythms illustrating the spirals of repeated patterns of addictive behaviour. Similarly, the 12-step programme is portrayed as a vicious cycle – talking over and over the very habit they’re trying to kick.
Where film and drama coincided was the clever use of sound. Luke Sutherland’s evocative composition used Orcadian birdsong and soundscape, while in the film, in contrast to the pounding techno beat, the elusive corncrake has the last laugh (especially for those who watch to the end of the credits.)
At the Book Festival, it was Amy Liptrot who, if we are to close the argument, proved the book surely comes first, as she read from a passage used in both adaptations.
My body is a continent. … When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there's an earthquake. The islands’ headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers.
You can’t beat words, so if you’ve not read it, grab the book before the film comes out on general release in September.
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