Happy Old New Year, Katie! (It’s coming up three days from now.)

I left my initial comment on Janice’s blog hoping that her or one of her readers might have read the novel by Xavière, also called «La Punition», and tell me how the film was changed from the novel. Yesterday I received it by mail and read it myself, so let me briefly summarize some of the differences. (It is a quick read, a little over 90 pages with large print, a novella rathe than a novel.) The most substantial is that while Britt is murdered by a hit man at the end of the film, Xavière survives. Since she is telling the story in the first person, this is pretty obvious, unless she were writing something with an ending like Stephen Leacock’s “Soaked in Seaweed”: “I fell ill. I died. I buried myself. Would that others who write sea stories would do as much.” The film is altogether more violent than the novel. The murder of Raymond, with which the film starts, seems to have been inspired by an altercation in the novel between Gloria, the girl screaming in the next room in the prison-hotel where she and Xavière are kept, in a nightclub in Paris where Xavière is working, screaming a denunciation of Raymond, but no more than that. And of course there is also the brutal murder of someone trying to protect Britt by the hitman when he is on her trail. There is no hitman in the novel.

Where the film jumps back and forth in time, the novella follows events pretty much in a linear sequence. Where Britt’s trivial offence that leads to her punishment is clearly shown in the film, we have no clue what led to Xavière’s punishment. There is no romantic relationship between M. and Xavière in the novella as there is between Manuel and Britt in the film. Gloria is a more important character in the novella than in the film, while Antoni, one of Xavière’s young clients, also an important character in the novella, has his role reduced so much in the film that he goes uncredited.

In the novel Britt tells another girl in the prison-hotel that she wouldn’t be there if she had only had an abortion, and then she wouldn’t have had to turn to prostitution to support her child. This conversation is omitted from the film. In the film Françoise, the woman who introduces Britt to Manuel, clearly has a lesbian attraction to her, but no longstanding lesbian relationship exists between the two women, as is the case in the novella.

I think this is one case where the film was superior to the book, a bestseller in France. The differences from the novella seemed to be directed by artistic choices, not by commercial considerations. Nevertheless, one could make a case for a film that more closely followed Xavière’s own vision, although I doubt that at this remove in time, one will ever emerge