Voice and vision: The making of L’amore molesto (Troubling Love) by Mario Martone

Abstract

This article examines the adaptation of Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto (Troubling Love) (1995) as a successful case study in which the aesthetics of the cinematic medium (the ‘vision’) dominate over the verbal essence of the written page (the ‘voice’). Through a number of revisions of the screenplay Martone has achieved a finished product that is intrinsically ‘cinematic’ (i.e., dependant on images, sound, montage, camera angle, etc. to construct narrative and meaning). Particularly important in this cinematic distancing from the literary source was the progressive elimination of numerous voice-overs that Martone had planned in the earlier drafts of the script. Adaptation studies do not usually focus on the intermediate text between novel and film, the screenplay. However, my analysis of three drafts of the screenplay that Martone wrote for Troubling Love (one published and two unpublished) will demonstrate that such archival study can shed new light into the process of film writing and film adaptation.