Word: denning
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...movie adaptations go, in my Father's Den wears its literary heart on its sleeve. Based on Maurice Gee's 1972 novel of the same name, the film begins with the poetic voice-over of a teenage girl, later seen lying, as if in a coffin, along a railway track: "One day in a town at the end of the world, the tide went out and never returned." But as we get to know the soon-to-disappear Celia (Emily Barclay), whose relationship with a returned war photographer (Matthew Macfadyen) the movie charts, the film's biggest surprise...
...years since In My Father's Den became a Kiwi classic. The book's cool, ironic narrator Paul Prior, an English teacher rebelling against his religious upbringing, embodied the tough outsider of New Zealand literature, starting with John Mulgan's 1939 novel Man Alone. When Gee began writing the book in the late '60s, "we were able to shake off that oppressive Puritanism," the author, 73, recalls, "which wasn't only religious, it was secular." Novels like Gee's award-winning Plumb (1978), based on the life of his Presbyterian minister turned Communist grandfather James Chapple, continued that shaking...
...film is concerned with a different kind of discovery: what happens when a man returns home after 17 years abroad to find an old girlfriend (Jodie Rimmer) whose wildly imaginative daughter might just be his. In this sense, McGann remains true to the book: In My Father's Den is about the sexual charge that can dance between men and their daughters (or would-be daughters), superbly captured in a scene where Celia interviews Paul for a class assignment and both flirt in different ways with the truth...
...McGann a perfect celluloid soul mate to explore these shadowlands. With Possum, his award-winning 1996 short, the filmmaker, trained at Melbourne's Swinburne school, found improbable lightness in the dark fable of a boy and his autistic sister at the turn of last century. With Father's Den, he sets a match to New Zealand's "cinema of unease," the phrase coined by Sam Neill to describe the country's love affair with darkness. "I need a cigarette to cope with this kind of scenery," says Paul at one point. So, too, might audience-goers, so slowly and inexorably...
...salient lesson in adapting books for film. In an age when words can be too slavishly followed on screen, In My Father's Den is neither better nor worse than the novel, but in every sense equal to it. It's a case of a filmmaker traveling far to get close to a literary classic...