From classic authors like F.M. Dostoevsky to young female writers who have become some of the most important voices of millennials, like Sally Rooney, literature has always inspired some of the greatest movies and series. This transfer from book to film has often sparked discussions, between fans of the books who lament the loss of tone or the necessary excision of events from the book and those who believe that the best adaptations capture the mood of the book but completely reimagine the story for the screen. We asked the Films in Frame editors, cinephiles and book lovers, to recommend a film and the book it is based on that they’ve seen and read, enjoyed in different ways, and believe to be an ideal package for the summer vacation.

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Mariana, Mariana (1987, dir. Alberto Isaac) based on Battles in the Desert (1980) by José Emilio Pacheco

Considered a modern classic of Mexican literature, the novella Battles in the Desert – unfortunately, not yet translated into Romanian, but available in an excellent English version – by José Emilio Pacheco, one of the most important Latin American writers, journalists, and screenwriters of the second half of the 20th century – is a little gem I read voraciously last summer, and which I wholeheartedly recommend as summer reading. In short, it presents a retrospective view of a narrator who recalls his childhood in the late 1940s with a mix of nostalgia and lucidity, finding latent seeds of the political violence of those years in the small games and gestures of his everyday life, torn apart by a central event with devastating consequences: he has his first crush on Mariana, the mother of his friend Jim, who we understand to be the mistress of a high-ranking government official. While Alberto Isaac’s 1980s adaptation, Mariana Mariana, may not be a cinematic revelation, it perfectly matches the bittersweet melancholy of summer, adapting the novella’s action into two temporal planes and simultaneously sketching a portrait of the radically transforming metropolis of Mexico City in a manner Alfonso Cuarón would seek to evoke thirty years later in Roma (2018).

* Not to be confused with Batallas en el cielo / Battle In Heaven (2015) by Carlos Reygadas, which is an entirely different film, in both senses of the expression.

A second (and very romantic) recommendation: A Room With a View (1985, dir. James Ivory) adapted after E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel of the same name. (Flavia Dima)

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Student (2012, dir. Darejan Omirbaev) based on Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

For those willing to read Dostoevsky’s novel on the beach, there is an eccentric adaptation by Kazakh director Darejan Omirbaev, a master of mise-en-scène, to complement the experience. An adaptation that reduces the novel’s mangrove-like sentences to a short and stark film like a gunshot in the desert. Without the emotional blackmail displayed with gusto and without mind games – from all the lushness of Dostoyevsky’s work there remains only a silent revolt against the turbo-capitalist society of Central Asia, where the new ideologues who got rich quickly and the monstrous glass facades drown the anonymous dramas of the transition into oblivion. Omirbaev prefers a kind of deafening silence to subtlety – a Range Rover towed by a donkey over a puddle – replacing the naturalism that fails to see beyond sadness and the odious with a poetic treatment of the world, summoned to become the space of sovereign, inexplicable gestures. (Victor Morozov)

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All Of Us Strangers (2023, dir. Andrew Haigh) based on Strangers (1987) by Taichi Yamada

English director Andrew Haigh’s latest film tenderly explores the forms of love and, especially, the forms of silence – how the honesty of coming out, or on the contrary, secrets, can hurt us. A dive into the depths of vulnerability, All of Us Strangers follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a screenwriter in his 40s, as he returns to his childhood home and finds himself caught in a ghostly dialogue with his parents, with the enigmatic Harry (Paul Mescal) by his side. The film slightly deviates from the novel that is based on, Strangers by Taichi Yamada, where the protagonist is straight and recently divorced, but maintains the themes of loneliness and the search for closeness. As always, Andrew Haigh excels in pillow talk and naturalness – so difficult to achieve on screen – and the music perfectly punctuates the key moments.  A nostalgic gem, available on Disney+. (Cristina Ștefan)

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Dune: Part One & Dune: Part Two (2021, 2024, dir. Denis Villeneuve) based on Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert

*or when you are sound asleep on the back of the tiger that is going to eat you

While Frank Herbert’s novel patiently explores the rise and fall of Paul Atreides at the pace of a political and moral thriller, Villeneuve’s movie fails to convincingly render the inner turmoil of the future Messiah, replacing it with the majesty of the visually constructed world and a soundscape that constantly signals, like in school, that we are witnessing a mythological story of importance and depth. The gravitas with which Villeneuve imbues the story on screen is not in itself a sin or an excess for the sake of flexing Hollywood-funded muscles, but rather, I believe, a sincere form of compensation: something is fundamentally lost when you don’t know how to create characters (see the director’s statement that cinematography is slightly more important than character development) and your protagonist is a boy who, in the process of maturing, finds himself at the centre of the time axis and makes calculations and strategies based on a collective and cosmic past and future of the race. It’s a compensation for the fact that Villeneuve forgets the flesh-and-blood people behind the legends, even though he doesn’t forget to show us every grain of golden sand in the hand-to-hand combat or the lines of warships. An oppressive, grandiose materiality that drowns out any thought, any reflection.

Villeneuve’s error is that he “takes figures as truthtelling concepts, solid, canonical, and binding. And taking a figure literally is not a benign or noble illusion. Rather, it is like living in danger of being eaten by a tiger we do not even know is there because we are sound asleep on its back” (J.Hillis Miller, from Nietzsche in Basel). This error does not occur in Herbert’s work, and I don’t understand how Villeneuve missed (or why he let slip) the relevance and acuity of the material he had on hand: the white saviour who “uplifts” the inferior race and asserts himself precisely by taking control of their resources, through an ideal combination of religious fanaticism and propaganda machinery, who sees the future bloodied by the deaths of millions and must decide whether to choose that path or not, whether to choose genocide for the sake of a “brighter future”, only for all his intentions to be eroded and emptied of meaning by the hollow perpetuation of his values by others.

Despite all this, I won’t lie, if I silence my thoughts and the source material to experience only what I see on screen, I’m mesmerised by this world fraught with prophecy and myth built by Villeneuve, just as I am mesmerised by Timothée Chalamet as he transcends from prince to Kwisatz Haderach. It’s a glorious piece of cinema but completely misses its political and philosophical stakes. You can see both parts on Max. (Alexa Florescu)

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Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971, dir. Shuji Terayama) based on the book of the same name (1967) by Shuji Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and Yasuhiro Yoshioka

Pardon the gesture of recommending, in a list dedicated to adaptations, something that says not just “throw your books away” but “throw them in the trash”. However, I take this opportunity to point out that Terayama’s Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is, in fact, an adaptation of his collection of essays and later play of the same name. I’m cheating a bit here, as the adaptation is loose at best, and more properly false: none of the three versions depict the same events, but they all speak about young generations abandoned by society, about instilling critical thinking and a rebellious spirit in the face of consumerism and American cultural and material imperialism. Notoriously, Terayama’s texts encouraged dozens of young people to run away from home, in other words, to take to the streets and break free, only to be picked up by others like them in solidarity (Terayama’s theatre troupe, Tenjō Sajiki, was itself a small refuge for people abandoned by society or forced to run away from home). Once again I’m cheating because the original collection cannot be read, as far as I know, in any language other than Japanese; instead, I recommend the (authorised or not) translations of Terayama‘s poems. I use this opportunity to draw attention to Terayama as coming from the literary world, an aspect that critics sometimes relegate to a more distant corner in discussions about his cinema. Otherwise, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets – arguably one of the best and most impertinent films ever made – will be screening on August 24 at CineMasca. (Dora Leu)

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The Captive (2000, dir. Chantal Akerman) based on In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) – Volume Five: The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

Early in her career, Akerman avoided literary adaptations because they contravened her cinematic principles of preserving the specificity of the medium. But despite her initial scepticism, she manages to conjoin Proust’s modernist writing with her own formal modernism, without the latter seeming merely a derivative of literature. In The Captive, she marks this distance from the novel through several decisions: she changes the characters’ names – Albertine becomes Ariane and Marcel becomes Simon – she relocates the spatial-temporal setting to contemporary times, and radically alters the story’s ending.

The film revolves around this unhappy couple: the neurotic, pathologically jealous man whose desire is to penetrate his partner’s erotic imagination, to demystify lesbian desire, while the female character is a dreamy, inert muse, difficult to read due to her moral ambivalence and sexual fluidity. Simon (Stanislas Merhar) feeds on the obsession of love, which he can only perceive as a continuous unveiling of his beloved, while Ariane (Sylvie Testud) is at the opposite pole: she is drawn to mystery, to the unknown, to what cannot be penetrated in the other. The Captive is constructed as a slow, hypnotic duel where possessiveness collides with passivity. (Ramona Aristide)

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Normal People (2020, dir. Lenny Abrahamson, Hettie Macdonald) based on the novel of the same name (2018) by Sally Rooney

“Get ready to feel everything” – this could very well serve as an opening message to Normal People, not as a key to the interpretation of the film but more as a warning about the emotional suspense that lies ahead. The 12-episode miniseries produced by Hulu, based on Irish writer Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, intimately captures the four-year on-and-off relationship between schoolmates (and later college colleagues) Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal). Marianne comes from a wealthy family, is intelligent and sarcastic. Connell, whose mom is a maid working for Marianne’s family, is handsome, athletic, smart, and popular. What they have in common is a magnetic attraction and a sharp wit – the former gets them into bed, while the latter makes them realise they can talk to each other in ways they can’t with anyone else.

How can you tell on screen the story of two characters whose entire journey starts from sexual tension without making it voyeuristic? This was one of the post-book and pre-film curiosities and one of the most pleasant surprises of the adaptation. The series is aware that sex is as much an expression of the characters as words are, which doesn’t make it gratuitous, just for the sake of it, but it’s bright and sensual like a soft whisper in the ear, a way to experience one’s own identity and relationships with other people. Beyond strong emotions and breath-taking moments, the film is a coming-of-age about the necessary and painful process of transitioning from the person you once were to the person you will become. The story is told in bursts, like vignettes where you feel like you are walking through the memories of the two, compiling images and experiences – a bike ride, a glance reflected in a pool – which, only in retrospect, prove to have meant everything.

The book comes with its own experience – with in-depth discussions about power and class relations, in a writing style as simple as it is profound. (Anca Vancu)

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An article written by the magazine's team