Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, The Blue Window:
What’s most cinematic in The Blue Window is the physical setting: the contrast between a small shadowy cabin, inhabited by a reclusive, emotionally inaccessible old woman, and the wide open, shining expanse of Lake Champlain right outside her windows. So much darkness inside, all that marvelous possibility outside. How to get from one to the other? In many ways, that view tells the whole story.Visit Suzanne Berne's website.
Judi Dench would be my choice to play Marika, the elderly woman. She’s an actress who knows how to give an impassive stare (Queen Victoria!), and at the same time communicate turbulence behind that stare. Very closed people can seem intimidating, and Dench is wonderful at portraying “toughness,” while hinting at great loneliness.
I’d love to see Laura Linney play Marika’s daughter, Lorna, the therapist who comes to visit for a few days. Linney is remarkably good at conveying awkwardness and insecurity, but a determination to try to behave well, even when behaving well seems next to impossible. For much of the novel, Lorna tries every way she can think of to reach her implacable mother and her unhappy son, who join forces against her, and mostly she’s thwarted. It’s crushing. What kind of therapist can’t get her own mother and son to tell her what’s wrong with them? But Lorna’s frustration and growing resentment is balanced by her dogged sense of sympathy with these two difficult people, who happen to be all the family she has in the world.
As for Adam, the 19-year-old, who has decided to quit using the first person to erase himself after something he did at college, I’d want Dominic Sessa. He was terrific in The Holdovers as a character who is outrageously stricken, angry, and full of self-loathing, but who maintains a funny kind of nobility. That’s how I see Adam. He’s his own worst enemy, but he’s also very smart, and sensitive; he sees other people with surprising clarity. And in his own problematic way, he’s trying to be honorable. He disgraced himself and he wants to atone for it. Unfortunately, he winds up making everyone else atone along with him.
Those are the novel’s main characters, but there’s one more I’d love to cast: Marika’s shy, ungainly, survivalist neighbor, Dennis, who comes over to her cabin for what may be the world’s worst dinner party. Chris Cooper would be the perfect actor to portray Dennis’s painful discomfort with himself and just about everyone else, and yet also his kindness.
The Page 69 Test: The Blue Window.
Q&A with Suzanne Berne.
--Marshal Zeringue
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