Tuesday, 20 May 2014

In Secret (Therese Raquin)

It's been a while since I read any Zola, so I picked up Therese Raquin under the impression that it was going to be a story of passionate forbidden love. Bored and stifled Therese marries the weak and dull Camille but is then introduced to his rakish friend Laurent. Immediately they connect and embark on a secret relationship. So far so expected, but then Zola takes us into the realms of Gothic horror and dark sensationalism which is almost overwhelming in its heightened language and pitch of despair.
Unable to live without each other, desperate and worried that they will no longer be able to conceal their feelings from the watching eyes of Mme Raquin and her weekly Thursday soiree guests, they decide to murder Camille. There are passages of extreme ghoulish melodrama - Camille biting a chunk out of Laurent's neck as he is lifted and thrown overboard into the Seine to drown, descriptions of morgue bodies (people were allowed to come and view the dead out of curiosity!) as Laurent seeks confirmation that Camille has died, the horrific treatment of a cat that torments the guilty murderers by its judging stare.
It was the first of Zola's novels to gain him any notoriety and caused a scandal at the time of its publication. I loved the nihilism, and the dark ending was perfect.

     

Official film website


There have been several film adaptations of Therese Racquin and its not surprising, as the source material is so good. This version plays on the recurring theme of "Be Silent. Don't make a Sound". When Therese is first left with Mme Raquin, she is told to be quiet and Mme Raquin, in a twist of things to come, embroiders the motto into a wall plaque. When Therese and Laurent meet in secret upstairs in the shop, while Mme Raquin is working downstairs, they have to do the same to avoid detection. After Camille's death, the grief and emotional outbursts of his mother become an embarrassment to their circle of friends, who tell her she mustn't upset herself and when she asks how long it takes to drown, decide to leave early (stay silent and don't bring up death). Finally, of course, there is the paralysis of Mme Raquin where she is unable to speak or move and must endure the second guessing of her thoughts by her guests.
It is slightly ironic casting that a face-lifted Jessica Lange plays Mme Raquin, as she has the face of a waxwork before the paralysis even strikes. The rest of the cast are brilliant and there are some great comic turns by Matt Lucas, Mackenzie Crook and Shirley Henderson (unhappily married to Lucas' Olivier and nipping off for a pick me up while feigning an attack of the vapours).
The tone is less dark than the book, leaving out some of the more macabre bits, but it does well in showing us the hell that the two murderers are now living in. At one point, lurching home from a night out trying to forget, Therese comes to a butchers market which has all the forebodings of purgatory.




If you enjoyed the book, try reading Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell Tale Heart or Zola's Germinal

If you enjoyed the film, there is also a French adaptation of Germinal with Gerard Depardieu which is very good

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