What I’ve read of Arturo Pérez-Reverte seems to exist somewhere in between Umberto Eco and Dan Brown (not an entirely bad place to be), and so do the film adaptations of his work that I’ve watched.
Either he’s good at writing screen-translatable novels, or he’s been lucky (which is better than being good) to have found skilled translators like Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate) and, in the case of Uncovered, Jim McBride.
If I may use another analogy, Uncovered (adapted from La Tabla de Flandes) is to The Ninth Gate what Manhunter is to Red Dragon — which is really just a roundabout way of saying that it’s not nearly as good, but not too shabby either.
I think it comes down to who made better changes to the source material. The Ninth Gate is based on El Club Dumas, but Polanski excised the entire subplot that dealt with the titular club (no doubt seeing it for what it was; i.e., a very long red herring), leaving him with a tighter, leaner supernatural romp.
Moreover, Polanski changed some of the names — a choice that was only logical considering the non-Hispanic cast and the English dialogue; why bother pretending any of the characters were Spanish? It’s less disingenuous to rename the villain “Boris Balkan” than it is to have Frank Langella play “Varo Borja.”
Conversely, Uncovered was shot and set in Barcelona and features characters named Julia Darro, César, Menchu, Lola, Don Manuel and Alvaro, played by Kate Beckinsale, John Wood, Sinead Cusack, Helen McCrory, Michael Gough and Art Malik, respectively.
Needless to say, they all speak the King’s English — although, to be fair, they do it consistently; as far as I can remember, the writers resisted the bad habit of confecting macaronic lines (just the other day I was watching Glenn Ford in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse spewing such nonsense as “cuidado with this one”), thus making it easier to make believe that what we’re hearing is a sort of synchronous English dub of the characters speaking Spanish amongst themselves.
Still, the movie would sound better — or at least less schizophrenic — if they’d just moved the action to London and done their own version of the Varo Borja-Boris Balkan switch (that’s just an example; I know Uncovered predated The Ninth Gate).
Incidentally, changing the geographical setting and the nationality of the characters wouldn’t have been as outrageous as the one unforgivable alteration they made to the novel. I’m talking about chess expert Muñoz, whom Pérez-Reverte described thus,
“He must have been just over forty, he was very thin and … of medium height. His hair was brushed straight back, with no parting, and was receding at the temples. He had large ears, a slightly aquiline nose, and his dark eyes were set deep in their sockets, as if viewing the world with distrust.”
And later,
“Muñoz glanced at the door. The lighting in the bar made him look weary and accentuated the shadows under his eyes, making them appear even more deeply sunk. With his large ears, sticking out above the collar of his raincoat, his big nose and his gaunt face, he looked like a thin, ungainly dog.”
Somehow, Muñoz magically became Domenec (Paudge Behan), a dirty blonde beach(less) bum closer in age to Julia. The sole purpose of this was to provide Julia with a secondary romantic interest (after the first one gets got), which in turn was an excuse to have delectable, short-haired, 21-year-old Beckinsale show off her skinny fucking body — but then they didn’t need to give Muñoz an Adaptational Attractiveness upgrade for that; they’d already gotten Beckinsale to take her top off for no good reason (or two good reasons, as the case may be) in a sexy non-sex scene.
People who have read the book will understandably expect the gentleman with the Dalí mustache who is playing against Domenec in the latter’s first scene to be the Muñoz character, so I guess the whole thing may be (in addition to an opportunity for T&A) an in-joke; if so, it’s not funny, though I will concede that Behan does have fun with Domenec and his joy is infectious.
Anyway, an expert is needed because Julia, an art restorer, discovers a painted-over message on a 1471 Flemish masterpiece by the fictional Van Huys called The Chess Game. The inscription reads “Qvis Necavit Eqvitem,” Latin for “Who killed the knight?”
The knight is Roger D’Arras, seen in the painting playing chess with Duke Ferdinand while the duke’s wife and Roger’s lover, Beatrix of Burgundy, watches them in the background. César, the fag to Julia’s hag, suggests this theory: “Jealous husband kills wife’s lover, covers up evidence. The duke killed the knight.” This prompts Julia to ask, “Why would the duke commission a painting that accused him of murder?”
Julia has Domenec play the game depicted in the painting backwards (which he does offscreen). He determines that the black queen took the white knight; in other words, Beatrix murdered Roger (for reasons not worth recounting), and “the duke knew [it], but he couldn’t accuse her publicly, so he had Van Huys hide the accusation in the painting.” I kept waiting, to no avail, for Julia to rephrase her earlier question along the lines of, ‘Why would the duke commission a painting that (kind of, but not really) accused his wife of murder?’
The second half of the film is devoted to a series of ongoing murders somewhat related to the painting, and having in common with it that it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who the killer queen (hint hint) is in the present.
All things considered, the screenplay is nothing to write home about, but Uncovered is nonetheless a pretty good-looking movie with great locations (you can’t go wrong with Gaudí) and neat props (basically, anything directly involving the palimpsestic painting). It’s no Ninth Gate, but I’ll take it over The Da Vinci Code any day of the week.
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