Saph

For our friend/former roommate M's birthday last weekend he decided to host a screening of the recent two-part Three Musketeers film adaptation, D'Artagnan and Milady.

Apparently this is the first French film adaptation in sixty years?! (which I did not know before looking at the Wikipedia just now) and I think we all had a vague conception that, being French, it was likelier to be moderately book-accurate than the run of modern English film adaptations. As it turns out this was foolish and prejudiced of us. French directors have just as much fun picking and choosing their favorite bits of The Three Musketeers and jettisoning the rest as anybody else.

That said: I think most of the changes are quite fun and interesting! Perhaps most notably, this is the most successful Milady Positive Musketeers adaptation that I've yet encountered. At least 50% of the plot changes are in service of ensuring that the Musketeers continue to see Milady as a primary antagonist while ensuring that we-the-viewers are tilting our heads like 'hmm ... but is she though ......'

Case in point: the biggest plot change is that suddenly we are very concerned about Huguenots. Athos now comes from a Protestant family and has an ardent Huguenot brother who is on the other side in La Rochelle; meanwhile the whole conflict is being escalated by Gaston of Orléans, who's the real villain of the piece. Why does Gaston of Orléans need to be the real villain of the piece? So that by comparison Cardinal Richelieu is not so bad, so that the schemes on which he's sending Milady are really not so bad, so actually --

( more Milady changes, big spoilers )

The other two biggest plot changes are also very funny to me .... one is that the creative team were like "what do Porthos and Aramis have going on with the Milady plot? Well ... nothing really. So instead we are going to give them a comic b-plot about finding which hot soldier knocked up Aramis' feisty sister. Since when does Aramis have a feisty sister SINCE NOW." ( more spoilers )

The other is that midway through movie two they slide in a new semi-historical OC (semi-historical because he's based on this guy but sixty years too early) who immediately steals the show in every possible way; he drops the best one-liners in the film, saunters casually in to save the Musketeer's asses on at least two different occasions, and is also the hottest man on the screen. To be clear I love this, big ups to the New Improved Musketeer, absolutely in the spirit of Dumas Pere. It did not at all shock me to learn that the creative team were now angling to make a TV show with this guy as the lead. I hope it succeeds because I'd watch the hell out of it.

Other notes: the costuming is very brown in the way that is clearly intended to shout "historical accuracy!" while demonstrating the exact opposite. One of the friends attendant at the party is a historical costume hobbyist and she spent the whole evening glowering at the screen muttering 'where is everyone's LACE?' And then every so often someone would show up with a plasticky lace border around their neckline and we'd all shout 'LOOK! LACE!' which strangely did not soothe her.

ON the other hand, at one point a character in a fraught chase sequence is shown actually changing horses, which so delighted the horse-knowers among us that they immediately forgave Eva Green every implausible corset lugged straight off the set of Penny Dreadful.

On the third hand: no valets. WHEN will someone make a Three Musketeers adaptation with vales?

I'm thinking even more fondly of The Mune in retrospect also because although I don't know that I feel that Sue Dawes is always 100% succeeding at her Victorian pastiche she has definitely done her research and is making a solid effort. Meanwhile, the book I read immediately afterwards, Jen Fawkes' Daughters of Chaos, is a Civil War-set epistolary novel that has no interest in trying to sound like something written in nineteenth century. This is of course a choice an author is free to make, but not one that I personally welcome -- although this turned out to be in the broad scheme the least of my problems with this book.

( entirely problems )

Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide surprised me in several ways, some good, some bad, and some just very funny.

For a start, for a book titled Notes from a Regicide, it is really pretty minimally about regicide. I would have liked a bit more regicide. On the other hand, it is maximally about living on after dramatic events, about Having Done something world-shaking and then becoming just another person moving the various broken-and-put-back-together pieces of yourself through a life like anybody else's, and that I liked very much.

It is also, I cannot help but think, about what happens when an author sits down and thinks 'I want to write trans Grantaire but am I more interested in transmasc Grantaire or transfem Grantaire ... well! actually!! Who needs an Enjolras, why NOT trans het Grantaire x Grantaire!' I can't in any way prove this but once I started thinking it I couldn't un-think it and it did absolutely bring a particular lens to my reading of the book that heightened both my appreciation and my irritation ...

Okay, so the plot. In the novel's present day, Griffon, an NYC journalist, is arranging the papers of his deceased adoptive parents, Etoine and Zaffre. Etoine and Zaffre are immigrants from a Ruritanian principality named Stephensport; in their younger days, they were instrumental in bringing about revolutionary change to Stephensport, subsequent to which they fled to NYC and lived out the rest of their lives as mildly notable elderly emigré artists. The novel moves back and forth between Etoine's narrative of his life in Stephensport -- as written during a time in prison post-regicide when he thought Zaffre was dead -- and Griffon's notes on his own life with these people, how he came to be a part of their lives as a trans teen from an abusive home, his various attempts and failures to understand them and vice versa.

The other reason I think Les Mis is integral to this novel, by the way, is the fact that Zaffre is compared on like the second or third page to Jean Valjean because of her strong back and shoulders, the first reference the book ever makes, and I do think that if you're turning around thoughts about revolution and post-revolution and traumatized children rescued by traumatized people you might get end up with something like the shape of this book. The Griffon chapters are about how Griffon loves his parents and is fascinated by them and is also really often deeply annoyed by them, the way they often don't recognize his various attempts to gain their approval, the way they have their own private history that they will not share, the way their house is always messy, the way they behave really embarrassingly in art museums. And sometimes he lashes out at them, and sometimes they lash out at him, and sometimes they do provide exactly what's needed and sometimes it's exactly the opposite. I enjoyed seeing this domestic-but-not-at-all-cozy narrative juxtaposed with the fantastical revolution story; I've never seen it done quite this way before, and it's not what I expected, and I liked it quite a bit.

The revolution story itself -- well, this is the part, I think, that perhaps needs a bit more regicide. All the backstory is from Etoine's point of view, and Etoine has gotten all the not-caring-about-the-revolution-except-as-it-impacts-his-beloved bits of Grantaire. Zaffre, despite clearly being a fellow Grantaire -- she's severely, schizoaffectively depressed and introduced by Etoine as a fellow art student who's awkwardly obsessed with him before the feelings later become mutual -- is also the Enjolras; she's passionate about the revolution and deeply involved in the logistics of it (and blonde, and majestic, and compared at one point to the Marianne.) But we know very little about why she's passionate about it or what kind of logistical activities she's doing for it because Etoine barely talks about it. Etoine really just wants to talk about his alcoholism and his trans journey and his romance with Zaffre, until circumstances eventually slam him into the regicide situation. Griffon, annotating the text, complains about how little Etoine talks about the revolution, and I think Isaac Fellman thinks that because he's pointed at the lacunae and drawn a circle around it as Intentional he can dust his hands off and feel satisfied with it. I disagree! I think if you are titling your book Notes From a Regicide it is perhaps incumbent upon you to put at least a little bit of politics into it!

Also, speaking of politics ... NYC hasn't got any. ( This bit is technically spoilers but really just worldbuilding spoilers )

That said, I do like the little bits of worldbuilding we get about Stephensport, though I wish there were more of it -- the disintegrating electors buried in the stone yard who rise every couple of decades to choose a new king is really very good as a bad system of government -- and I like also that Fellman is one of the few contemporary authors I've come across who's both written a speculative society that supports a form of trans identity, and then instead of stopping there written about people in that society who are queer within that context, who want things that their society's particular allowed form of gender expression doesn't support or condone. So: an unusual book, an ambitious book. An interesting book, I think, on gender and identity and transgenerational trauma. Not a particularly interesting book on revolution. But revolution sells, I guess, so Notes from a Regicide it is.