Madame Solario

Madame Solario is a 2012 French drama film written, produced and directed by René Féret, based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Gladys Huntington. It concerns a young divorcee, of the title, and her brother, whose presence and relationship disrupts the calm of a grand lakeside hotel in the early 1900s. Background Féret had for a long time considered making a film based on Der Erwählte (The Holy Sinner) by Thomas Mann, a subject concerning love between a brother and sister, as well as on the anonymous French source which had inspired Mann's 1951 novel. He also read Anna, soror, an 1981 novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, this leading him on to the work by Gladys Huntington which had been one of Yourcenar's favourite books. Forbidden love is depicted in a hidebound society, within the small upper-class world at a resort on Lake Como, where the siblings become tangled in their web. He met Bernard Cohen, a journalist-translator passionate about the novel, who assisted him greatly, notably in obtaining the rights for the book. In his film Mystère Alexina Féret had worked with the private journal of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, condemned to emmesh herself in another identity, where the theme of the social relationship between love outside of rules, and those who impose the rules. The character of Madame Solario also intrigued the director Joseph Losey, who put her as one of his three favourtie fictional heroines, alongside Clea by Lawrence Durrell and Anna Karenina. The Hollywood producer Daniel Selznick had shown interest in bringing Huntington's work to the big screen during her lifetime. Sister and brother find themselves confronted by the organized, regulated social class, which indulges all the immoralities provided they are not seen or spoken. The novel had an especial appeal for him as it was fierce critic of an utterly privileged yet rotten milieu, obsessed with outward appearance; leaning on this theme avoided making the incestuous relation just a romantic story but demonstrated that in the end the relationship was the result of suffocation and past trauma. Natalia retains the awkwardness of adolescence, given the trauma she experienced but which "she hides behind her veiled beauty".