Sex, Guns, and Death: Deborah Warner's Adaptation of The Last September

Abstract

The title of Elizabeth Bowen's 1929 novel The Last September denotes end of an age of political innocence, or perhaps more correctly, of political insou ciance: last days in which Anglo-Irish rule of Ireland could be conduct ed with colonial hauteur. The novel carries considerable authority, as Bowen herself grew up in Big House society in County Cork, and was twenty-one years old?or young, like her protagonist Lois Farquar?in 1920, year in which novel takes place. Director Deborah Warner 1999 film adaptation of novel, though commercially unsuccessful, also merits critical attention for several reasons. Beautifully filmed by cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, its star cast, including Maggie Smith, Fiona Shaw, and Michael Gambon, is supple mented by brilliant newcomer Keeley Hawes in lead role. The film also treats Anglo-Irish nonchalance with right degree of dry irony, thanks to a polished screenplay by novelist John Banville. In addition, Warner and Banville's adaptation of novel raises important questions regarding politics of Irish history in film. Warner and Banville restructure plot and add a new line, giving credence to film theorist Brian McFarlane's distinction between plot and story. McFarlane defines story as basic succession of events, while plot is the distinctive way in which is made strange, creatively deformed and defamiliarized.1 In other words, plot is individual narrator's interpretation of base material, and it goes with out saying that every narrator sees and tells a in his or her own way. McFarlane stresses, in first chapter of Novel to Film: An Introduction to Theory of Adaptation (1996), that adaptations are always also originals, and thus need to be judged by filmmaker's intentions regarding fidelity or non fidelity to original, rather than by a dogged insistence that film repro duce novel verbatim. The latter is something a film cannot do, because film