Monte Cristo Query
29/12/08 13:28![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madrobinsYesterday, when I was milking my headcold for all it was worth, I sat in the sunroom and watched all seven hours of the 1998 Le Comte de Monte Cristo with Gerard Depardieu. This certainly makes any sort of sloth the rest of you indulged in piffling by comparison. But it left me with a question, and you lot may have an answer or six.
I love Monte Cristo, which I read the first time when I was about twelve--in the Bantam edition, which meant it was somewhat abridged. That's the edition I keep reading, because it's the one I own, so I dont' really know what was taken out--but the abridged version has plenty of stuff in it; I can barely imagine the story holding any more. This film version is luscious to look at, and Depardieu has the gravitas to play the comte--his son played the young Edmond Dantes. The costumes are wonderful (although the bulk of the story takes place in the 1830s, a lamentable time for women's fashion, with those semi-high-waisted gowns that are neither one thing or the other, and make even beautiful women look oddly like storks or hunchbacks).
But I keep wondering. In this version, Monte Cristo has Bertuccio (who becomes something like Monte Cristo's friend and confidant, which is a nice touch even though it belies the comte's basic isolation) go out and find him a mistress, a woman as unlike Mercedes de Morcerf as possible--blond, young, naif--someone likens her to a brioche, and I couldn't help but think of her that way thereafter. Her name is Camille de la Richardais, and she's a widow. And I don't remember any such character in the book. We get to see Monte Cristo be alternately charming and mysterious with her, and perhaps that's another humanizing, anti-isolation touch.
By the end of the film, Camille sends him away, knowing that while she loves him she would never be enough for him. Affecting scene. Maximillien Morrel and Valentine de Villefort are joyously reunited. Haidee, the Princess of Janina, is married off, off camera to Franz d'Epinay (Valentine's intended intended). And at the end Dantes returns to Marseilles to find Mercedes, and is reunited with her (and drags her, fully dressed and in petticoats and hoops, into the ocean to frolic, which struck me as spectacularly ill-advised, but picturesque).
Now, unless the Bantam edition veers hugely from the original text, at the end of the book Mercedes goes off to a convent to await her son's return from military service in Algiers; Valentine and Maximillien are reunited and given the comte's fortune. And Dantes and Haidee sail off into the sunset together, leaving behind a note that counsels the young lovers that the greatest wisdom on earth is contained in two words: Wait and Hope.
No Camille de la Richardais. Is she a figment of this film version, or did I miss her in abridgement? And why is it that none of the film versions ever seem to have the comte ending up with Haidee?
I love Monte Cristo, which I read the first time when I was about twelve--in the Bantam edition, which meant it was somewhat abridged. That's the edition I keep reading, because it's the one I own, so I dont' really know what was taken out--but the abridged version has plenty of stuff in it; I can barely imagine the story holding any more. This film version is luscious to look at, and Depardieu has the gravitas to play the comte--his son played the young Edmond Dantes. The costumes are wonderful (although the bulk of the story takes place in the 1830s, a lamentable time for women's fashion, with those semi-high-waisted gowns that are neither one thing or the other, and make even beautiful women look oddly like storks or hunchbacks).
But I keep wondering. In this version, Monte Cristo has Bertuccio (who becomes something like Monte Cristo's friend and confidant, which is a nice touch even though it belies the comte's basic isolation) go out and find him a mistress, a woman as unlike Mercedes de Morcerf as possible--blond, young, naif--someone likens her to a brioche, and I couldn't help but think of her that way thereafter. Her name is Camille de la Richardais, and she's a widow. And I don't remember any such character in the book. We get to see Monte Cristo be alternately charming and mysterious with her, and perhaps that's another humanizing, anti-isolation touch.
By the end of the film, Camille sends him away, knowing that while she loves him she would never be enough for him. Affecting scene. Maximillien Morrel and Valentine de Villefort are joyously reunited. Haidee, the Princess of Janina, is married off, off camera to Franz d'Epinay (Valentine's intended intended). And at the end Dantes returns to Marseilles to find Mercedes, and is reunited with her (and drags her, fully dressed and in petticoats and hoops, into the ocean to frolic, which struck me as spectacularly ill-advised, but picturesque).
Now, unless the Bantam edition veers hugely from the original text, at the end of the book Mercedes goes off to a convent to await her son's return from military service in Algiers; Valentine and Maximillien are reunited and given the comte's fortune. And Dantes and Haidee sail off into the sunset together, leaving behind a note that counsels the young lovers that the greatest wisdom on earth is contained in two words: Wait and Hope.
No Camille de la Richardais. Is she a figment of this film version, or did I miss her in abridgement? And why is it that none of the film versions ever seem to have the comte ending up with Haidee?