thérèse raquin
Jul. 7th, 2023 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agletbabyi read thérèse raquin by zola last week! first things first, it's good: grim and depressing, yeah, in a way that honestly goes above and beyond. but good!
but the reason i read it, entirely and utterly, is because of thirst. i don't know if this is widely known (i don't know how widely known thirst is, in some ways), but thirst, the 2009 korean vampire film by handmaiden/oldboy director park chan wook, is based on this 1867 french naturalist novel. random! anyway i love thirst, and i am on an lifelong quest to read every interesting book ever published, so i figured, why not try this one? and i'm glad i did.
thirst is, for me - but i'm right on this one, honest - one of the best films about desire out there. hell, i would even tentatively say it's deeply romantic. it's not, like, a conventional love story (key image: song kang-ho lying on a hospital floor, drinking blood out of a comatose patient with a long straw), but i think it balances cruelty and tenderness in a way which marks park's best work.
it's a story about relationships, in the guise of a horror film. meanwhile, thérèse raquin is a horror novel, in the guise of a story about relationships.
there's a lot the stories still share. the broad structure of thérèse raquin is preserved in thirst. of course, park adds quite a lot (adultery in the 1860s becomes adultery+vampirism in the 2000s, but also all the christianity stuff: in thérèse raquin god is only really notable in absence), but the set-up of tae-ju/therese's situation is recognisably the same in both: the small, dark homes, the strange family dynamics, the small group of tile game-playing friends. even a lot of the fallout is similar: although zola doesn't have vampires, thirst's ghosts are taken right from his novel. both texts are basically social critiques, concerned with, i guess, the smallness of the lives people have access to, and how they try to expand them.
the thing that really surprised me, though, is just how grotesque thérèse raquin already is. i was deeply curious to know how the idea for a pretty intense film got generated by a presumably stiff and self-censoring classic. the answer? it's all already there! there's literally vampire imagery in thérèse raquin that doesn't make it into thirst. as mentioned, there's ghosts. but before anyone dies, the characters are half alive, already dead, living in open graves alongside puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their heads and arms when you pulled the strings. there's some gnarly body horror too. i read things have gotten worse since we last spoke last year, and i didn't like it anyway, but there was half a paragraph which trumped the entire nasty conclusion which was the whole point of that book. there's a ton of horror imagery and tropes in thérèse raquin which i've encountered before, but only in things that came after this - and i don't know enough about the histories of these things to say for sure that it's an originator, but it certainly felt shockingly timeless in its choices. (i'm being coy; horror is about knowing something's coming, but not when or what, right?) (although i wouldn't say it's scary, exactly - and i wouldn't say thirst is either.)
the adaptation makes a lot more sense, which is honestly more than i was expecting.
also, and this is a total tangent, and probably off-base, but it made me think about decision to leave again. decision to leave is park's newest film and it's.. okay. it's up against a really strong filmography, so in any other context, i'd probably be a bit more enthusiastic, but i simply like park's other work more, and it's difficult for me to disentangle that, and judge it on its own merits. having said that, i also like thinking about decision to leave more when i think about it in the context of his other films. and one major feeling i had, coming out of it for the first time, was that decision to leave was thirst with the timings off. (and no vampires. but that doesn't mean something isn't related to thirst.)
but i also think thérèse raquin allows some sort of opening onto decision to leave. there's (spoilers, broadly) spouse murder. maybe a little bit of adultery. this is fairly minor, but both therese and seo rae (dtl's female lead) are in some way foreign to their societies, in a way which loops back to their statuses as critiques of life in them. (dtl is also mildly unconvinced by the smallness of its character's lives.) (therese's foreignness - she's half algerian, and was born there - is also employed in a pretty racist way, in one of the two instances its mentioned, just as a warning.) thérèse raquin is interested in the assumptions made upon observing people, without really knowing them, and whilst this only becomes a minor part of thirst, it's arguably the whole concern of dtl. and i think there's a coldness around both therese and seo rae that's supposed to be interesting, worrisome, also also understandable; what do you do when you empathise with someone you can't understand, and won't let you in? this is a question for laurent, hae-jun, and the audience.
it's hard to say if the similaities are because of a return to the book, or just park and chung seo-kyung (who co-wrote both)'s interest in certain themes. but i am desperate to find a way into decision to leave, because i do think it's good, i just haven't clicked with it. so here i am.
but the reason i read it, entirely and utterly, is because of thirst. i don't know if this is widely known (i don't know how widely known thirst is, in some ways), but thirst, the 2009 korean vampire film by handmaiden/oldboy director park chan wook, is based on this 1867 french naturalist novel. random! anyway i love thirst, and i am on an lifelong quest to read every interesting book ever published, so i figured, why not try this one? and i'm glad i did.
thirst is, for me - but i'm right on this one, honest - one of the best films about desire out there. hell, i would even tentatively say it's deeply romantic. it's not, like, a conventional love story (key image: song kang-ho lying on a hospital floor, drinking blood out of a comatose patient with a long straw), but i think it balances cruelty and tenderness in a way which marks park's best work.
it's a story about relationships, in the guise of a horror film. meanwhile, thérèse raquin is a horror novel, in the guise of a story about relationships.
there's a lot the stories still share. the broad structure of thérèse raquin is preserved in thirst. of course, park adds quite a lot (adultery in the 1860s becomes adultery+vampirism in the 2000s, but also all the christianity stuff: in thérèse raquin god is only really notable in absence), but the set-up of tae-ju/therese's situation is recognisably the same in both: the small, dark homes, the strange family dynamics, the small group of tile game-playing friends. even a lot of the fallout is similar: although zola doesn't have vampires, thirst's ghosts are taken right from his novel. both texts are basically social critiques, concerned with, i guess, the smallness of the lives people have access to, and how they try to expand them.
the thing that really surprised me, though, is just how grotesque thérèse raquin already is. i was deeply curious to know how the idea for a pretty intense film got generated by a presumably stiff and self-censoring classic. the answer? it's all already there! there's literally vampire imagery in thérèse raquin that doesn't make it into thirst. as mentioned, there's ghosts. but before anyone dies, the characters are half alive, already dead, living in open graves alongside puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their heads and arms when you pulled the strings. there's some gnarly body horror too. i read things have gotten worse since we last spoke last year, and i didn't like it anyway, but there was half a paragraph which trumped the entire nasty conclusion which was the whole point of that book. there's a ton of horror imagery and tropes in thérèse raquin which i've encountered before, but only in things that came after this - and i don't know enough about the histories of these things to say for sure that it's an originator, but it certainly felt shockingly timeless in its choices. (i'm being coy; horror is about knowing something's coming, but not when or what, right?) (although i wouldn't say it's scary, exactly - and i wouldn't say thirst is either.)
the adaptation makes a lot more sense, which is honestly more than i was expecting.
also, and this is a total tangent, and probably off-base, but it made me think about decision to leave again. decision to leave is park's newest film and it's.. okay. it's up against a really strong filmography, so in any other context, i'd probably be a bit more enthusiastic, but i simply like park's other work more, and it's difficult for me to disentangle that, and judge it on its own merits. having said that, i also like thinking about decision to leave more when i think about it in the context of his other films. and one major feeling i had, coming out of it for the first time, was that decision to leave was thirst with the timings off. (and no vampires. but that doesn't mean something isn't related to thirst.)
but i also think thérèse raquin allows some sort of opening onto decision to leave. there's (spoilers, broadly) spouse murder. maybe a little bit of adultery. this is fairly minor, but both therese and seo rae (dtl's female lead) are in some way foreign to their societies, in a way which loops back to their statuses as critiques of life in them. (dtl is also mildly unconvinced by the smallness of its character's lives.) (therese's foreignness - she's half algerian, and was born there - is also employed in a pretty racist way, in one of the two instances its mentioned, just as a warning.) thérèse raquin is interested in the assumptions made upon observing people, without really knowing them, and whilst this only becomes a minor part of thirst, it's arguably the whole concern of dtl. and i think there's a coldness around both therese and seo rae that's supposed to be interesting, worrisome, also also understandable; what do you do when you empathise with someone you can't understand, and won't let you in? this is a question for laurent, hae-jun, and the audience.
it's hard to say if the similaities are because of a return to the book, or just park and chung seo-kyung (who co-wrote both)'s interest in certain themes. but i am desperate to find a way into decision to leave, because i do think it's good, i just haven't clicked with it. so here i am.
