The Club Pérez-Reverte: Screen Adaptations of Best Sellers

Abstract

Arturo P?rez-Reverte is Spain's best-selling novelist, and five of his narratives have been adapted to the screen: El maestro de esgrima, La tabla de Flandes (film title: Uncovered), Un asunto de honor (film title: Cachito), Territorio Comanche, and El club Dumas (film title: The Ninth Gate). These novels and their screen adaptations represent a bridge between and low culture, and the films often follow similar strategies of adaptation: they eschew the intellectual element of the original narratives, replacing it with sex and action; ambiguous open endings become happy endings. Transnational casting, foreign directors, and filming English raise questions regarding the cultural identity of these cinematographic adaptations and of contemporary Spanish culture. Arturo P?rez-Reverte is Spain's best-selling novelist and the contemporary Spanish author with the largest international audience. His novels, translated into nineteen languages, are reaching readers around the world. With four novels and one short story having been made into movies, he is also among those Spanish novelists whose narratives have most been adapted to the screen. Filmed works include El maestro de esgrima, adapted by Pedro Olea (1992), La tabla de Flandes, made into Uncovered (1994) by Jim McBride; Un asunto de honor which became Enrique Urbizu's film Cachito ( 1995); Territorio Comanche ( 1997), filmed by Gerardo Herrero; and El club Dumas, filmed by Roman Polanski as The Ninth Gate (1999). (Gitano, filmed by Manuel Palacios 2000, was based on an original film-script by P?rez Reverte.) These works and their screen adaptations represent a bridge between and low culture. Jo Labanyi states that critical writing on Spanish is mostly limited to high culture but that in Spain certain areas of popular culture?rarely mass culture, with the exception certain periods of cinema?have been included the canon because they have been taken up by intellectuals who have consumed them (1,2-3). P?rez-Reverte's status as a best-selling novelist whose works have been adapted to the screen positions him precisely as an important manifestation of contemporary Spanish its broadest sense. Labanyi notes that It is only with the move to postmodernity, with its celebration of the global and of popular and mass culture, that at least a few Spanish cultural practitioners?Almodovar, P?rez-Reverte, Joaqu?n Cort?s?have made their international mark terms of popular as well as critical acclaim (10). Examination of the film adaptations of his novels constructs a bridge that takes us a step further into the high-culture / low-culture divide. Analysis of these film adaptations reveals that they generally share common strategies of adaptation to cater to the average film audience, and that their use of transnational casting, foreign directors, and filming English raise questions regarding the cultural identity of these cinematographic adaptations. El maestro de esgrima, an historical novel employing the structure of a detective narrative is set Madrid 1868, at a moment when the corrupt and incompetent Queen Isabel II is losing power, and republican forces are gathering strength to succeed her. Against this political