Yesterday, I finished the initial version, in English, of my movie adaptation of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke.Today, I started the translation of my movie script into French... since there are many reasons why a film on this subject must be an essentially French affair.
The tentative title of my movie is Adieu, Abelone. In aristocratic late 19th-century Denmark, Malte, the hero of Rilke's novel, has always been totally infatuated by his aunt, the Countess Abel Brahe, some fifteen years older than her romantic nephew. Although Rilke's novel provides no proofs enabling us to make such an assertion explicitly, it would appear that Malte and Abelone became incestuous lovers for a brief moment. Then Malte abandoned forever his native land. Learning of the death of his aunt, Malte suffered a trauma that evolved rapidly into a grave psychosis characterized by hallucinations and paranoia. Finally, after electric shock therapy at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, Malte emerged slowly from his mental afflictions and became a writer, inspired above all by Baudelaire. One might say that his salvation was poetry.
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