In his 1983 "Postscript to The Name of the Rose," Umberto Eco alluded to the film-ability of his novel: "Marco Ferreri once told me my dialogs are cinematographic because they last just long enough. Deliberately, when two of my characters pass, conversing, from the refractory to the cloister, I write with an eye to the floor plan, and when they arrive they stop speaking" (my translation). Though it was a bestseller so full of intricate discussions, historical and ecclesiastical allusions, and, of course, names, that many more may have bought than read it, The Name of the Rose is intensely visual. It's both visual and claustrophobic. The overall "set," the monastery, is so small, and the possibilities within it so constrained and so few, yet so full as Eco has written them, that the right filmmaker had only to follow Eco's lead.
Peter Greenaway (Drowning by Numbers, A TV Dante, Belly of the Architect) comes immediately to mind, because of Eco's labyrinth and puzzles; but so does the still active ninety-six-year-old Manoel de Oliveira (The Covent, The Divine Comedy, The Cannibals), who like the late Bresson sees religious pathways where the rest of us might not. I think the Rohmer of L'Anglaise et le duc, but also of My Night at Maud's, might have been an ideal translator of Eco's discussions, while the bluntness of the story's deaths, dangerous Inquisitor Gui, and the all-consuming final conflagration might have helped answer some filmgoers' problem with Rohmer. I love against-type casting, and might surely have "cast" Rohmer as this violent film's director.
I vaguely recall liking the film, as just another movie, in 1986. The chilly mountain monastery on the big screen must have impressed. But Annaud and his four screenwriters diminish Eco's work to Sherlock Holmes in cassocks.
Early on they wrest the point of view from Adso, lazily, to show the Abbot and aides uttering expository lines. Adso, young and old all at once because he tells the story years later with the perspective of age, unreliable and maybe-reliable narrator all at once for the same reason, is as pervasive and as absent as Boswell. His experience with the peasant girl comes dead center in the novel. Everything builds to and falls from it. This is ironic, tragic, laughable or (to be gentler) comical, because it's not his story. He's telling it. He puts her there. But it's not his story. So many years later there's simply no one left to stop him putting her there. Annaud & Co. make her something other than what both Adso and William, with the cruelty of their avocation, term her, a prostitute. Adso's obsession, his repeated use of the word "love" based on a single wordlessly grappling experience, without so much an exchange of names, wreaks biting satire upon celibacy. The girl's repeated appearances in the film, and her beyond belief escape from Gui, destroy Eco's satire, replacing it with the worst sort of maudlin.
Gui, as Eco portrays him, isn't a villain. He's more like bad weather: an unstoppable, unavoidable force. F. Murray Abraham plays him as a smooth thug who in movie cliché terms must fall. Eco dispatches him for Rome, with the Adso's doomed girl and Salvatore irrevocably in tow, before the conflagration precisely because he cannot fall.
Eco's title for the book might have been "Adso of Melk," but Italian publishers, he says, dislike proper names. Annaud seems to have wanted Eco's rose to be a rosebud. It's Kane's sled! It's Adso's girl! But Adso's superbly contradictory final line (I don't know Latin) is something like "A rose gone has no name; we keep empty names."
A rose is a labyrinth. Or, the Rose here is the Labyrinth? Shadow between its petals leads to its center. Annaud & Co. diminish the labyrinthine library. The crisis it entails begins in Eco's first few pages when the Abbot, portrayed more sympathetically, and as a wiser man, than in the film, challenges that the ingenious William should be able to deduce all he needs know about the library without setting foot inside it. Even though William fails to the extent that he must eventually enter the library and even return there, how could filmmakers, movie-makers, have thrown out this wonderfully Holmesian challenge?! Peter Greenaway might have build all else upon it. The difficulty of entry and close terror of being lost inside the library barely surface in the film.
Other losses: the significance of Arabic texts; the full impact of the running argument around blind Borges' disdain of laughter; any real sense of the monastery buildings' and rooms' locations in relation to each other with respect to the solving of the murders.
Please don't chide me about the different demands of prose and film. I've written about them myself. When I closed "Il nome della rosa," I knew I'd just read a beautiful film.
I can't imagine that this will ever be remade, and maybe that's just as well. But it could and should have been more than this too-simple movie.
Peter Greenaway (Drowning by Numbers, A TV Dante, Belly of the Architect) comes immediately to mind, because of Eco's labyrinth and puzzles; but so does the still active ninety-six-year-old Manoel de Oliveira (The Covent, The Divine Comedy, The Cannibals), who like the late Bresson sees religious pathways where the rest of us might not. I think the Rohmer of L'Anglaise et le duc, but also of My Night at Maud's, might have been an ideal translator of Eco's discussions, while the bluntness of the story's deaths, dangerous Inquisitor Gui, and the all-consuming final conflagration might have helped answer some filmgoers' problem with Rohmer. I love against-type casting, and might surely have "cast" Rohmer as this violent film's director.
I vaguely recall liking the film, as just another movie, in 1986. The chilly mountain monastery on the big screen must have impressed. But Annaud and his four screenwriters diminish Eco's work to Sherlock Holmes in cassocks.
Early on they wrest the point of view from Adso, lazily, to show the Abbot and aides uttering expository lines. Adso, young and old all at once because he tells the story years later with the perspective of age, unreliable and maybe-reliable narrator all at once for the same reason, is as pervasive and as absent as Boswell. His experience with the peasant girl comes dead center in the novel. Everything builds to and falls from it. This is ironic, tragic, laughable or (to be gentler) comical, because it's not his story. He's telling it. He puts her there. But it's not his story. So many years later there's simply no one left to stop him putting her there. Annaud & Co. make her something other than what both Adso and William, with the cruelty of their avocation, term her, a prostitute. Adso's obsession, his repeated use of the word "love" based on a single wordlessly grappling experience, without so much an exchange of names, wreaks biting satire upon celibacy. The girl's repeated appearances in the film, and her beyond belief escape from Gui, destroy Eco's satire, replacing it with the worst sort of maudlin.
Gui, as Eco portrays him, isn't a villain. He's more like bad weather: an unstoppable, unavoidable force. F. Murray Abraham plays him as a smooth thug who in movie cliché terms must fall. Eco dispatches him for Rome, with the Adso's doomed girl and Salvatore irrevocably in tow, before the conflagration precisely because he cannot fall.
Eco's title for the book might have been "Adso of Melk," but Italian publishers, he says, dislike proper names. Annaud seems to have wanted Eco's rose to be a rosebud. It's Kane's sled! It's Adso's girl! But Adso's superbly contradictory final line (I don't know Latin) is something like "A rose gone has no name; we keep empty names."
A rose is a labyrinth. Or, the Rose here is the Labyrinth? Shadow between its petals leads to its center. Annaud & Co. diminish the labyrinthine library. The crisis it entails begins in Eco's first few pages when the Abbot, portrayed more sympathetically, and as a wiser man, than in the film, challenges that the ingenious William should be able to deduce all he needs know about the library without setting foot inside it. Even though William fails to the extent that he must eventually enter the library and even return there, how could filmmakers, movie-makers, have thrown out this wonderfully Holmesian challenge?! Peter Greenaway might have build all else upon it. The difficulty of entry and close terror of being lost inside the library barely surface in the film.
Other losses: the significance of Arabic texts; the full impact of the running argument around blind Borges' disdain of laughter; any real sense of the monastery buildings' and rooms' locations in relation to each other with respect to the solving of the murders.
Please don't chide me about the different demands of prose and film. I've written about them myself. When I closed "Il nome della rosa," I knew I'd just read a beautiful film.
I can't imagine that this will ever be remade, and maybe that's just as well. But it could and should have been more than this too-simple movie.