Elaine May adapts Elaine Dundy’s ‘The Dud Avocado’
Born in 1921, Elaine Dundy was a Manhattanite whose pithy flare inked the pages of The Observer and the New York Herald and so on. Eventually her debut novel The Dud Avocado (1958) so chagrined her husband Kenneth Tynan – prominent theatre critic and sore loser – that she had to walk him out of earshot at parties when the occasional fan wanted to pass her an admiring word or four. These days the popularity of the book comes in waves, the most recent and significant driven by its reprint by The New York Review of Books. The time for adaptation grows exceedingly ripe. Who better to take on the task than Elaine May, born a decade later, the undersung American actress and filmmaker who never rose up from the shroud of Ishtar’s box office doom in 1987 and her ‘difficult’ reputation? (After 30 years, a new narrative feature is finally in the works.)1 Her male contemporaries would have doubtlessly skipped off with a second chance, but she never got one. May shrugged it off, content to grace us with her presence from time to time on the screen and the stage. Her abbreviated directorial career reflects upon her less as forlorn, and more as happily tossed-off. Who needs Hollywood, anyway?
If you’re willing, picture this:
A chipper gamine abroad in Paris “hellbent on living”. An all-expenses paid romp, the objective being a delicious tale to retell her money pot Uncle Roger upon her return. An impetuous klutz with a gorgeous lust for life, Sally Jay Gorce is one of Kerouac’s mad ones, saddled up for adventure. While May’s films have typically skewered egotistical males – Walter Matthau’s lucre-obsessed Epicurean in A New Leaf (1971); Charles Grodin’s fickle heart in The Heartbreak Kid (1972) – they could well do the same for Sally, a young woman and aspiring actress not without her own set of irksome quirks, among them a murderous urge to experience anything and everything.
A chintzy evening gown, all atwirl. The camera zooms out to reveal its inhabitant: Sally Jay and her new ‘do’, freshly stained rose-pink. Somewhere between another milky Pernod on Paris’s busiest street, she shoos away her married lover, with great madness of her hands, all the while reconnecting with an old crush – a thoroughbred American boy Larry.
If a flower blooms and then explodes silently on a thronging Parisian boulevard and nobody knows about it, does it make a sound?
A rundown of Sally’s (self-professed) default modes of wardrobe:
Tyrolean Peasant: a fashionable hour, at The Ritz. Patrons of the lobby bar pop champagne and wipe their hands on the skirt of Sally’s dirndl, mistaking it for a linen napkin.
Bar Girl: café, at dusk. A midnight snack of hot chocolate and croque monsieur is interrupted by a pair of grubby hands thrusting cigarettes in Sally’s face, now alight with alarm. On a second glance around the room her eyes widen; her nosh café is the preferred haunt of ladies of the night. Gasping, she reflexively snaps hand to breast, but this protective shielding of décolletage busts open her coat – underneath which she’s not sporting any real clothes. Mon dieu.
Dreaded Librarian: the taxidermy section of the library, midday. “Wherever can I find the latest on prosody and phonology?” But before a word can depart Sally’s lips, library patrons populate in fury, surrounding her like sardines. They are an incensed swarm; Dewey Decimal who? Apoplexy in the book stacks.
With a knack for metropolitan palaver, Elaine May would condense the bulk of Sally’s hilariously astute narrations and monologues, amplifying a readymade screwball situation into an excessive, impossible on-screen diversion. She is a master of the black comedy, and uses it to conjure a real sense of feeling, be it warmth or devastation, something which makes her work more caustic and subversive than most films of this style. See for instance how Matthau’s gold digging farce in A New Leaf ripples into veritable affection or how the final reckoning of Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid gives you unexpected chills. In The Dud Avocado, Sally learns to be independent – not everyone’s to be trusted and people are not what they seem. Chockfull of carousing and skedaddling, it’s a puffy sleeve of a book – elegantly humorous, not to be taken too seriously. But, as with May’s films, therein lies its power.
1. Pete Hammond, ‘Notes on the Season’, Deadline, November 2019.
Catherine Breillat Adapts Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
An ordinary woman gives up eating meat and becomes less ordinary. Sacrilege in South Korea! Her nightmares are overcast by carnivores and family values.
The closed walls of a high-rise contain a husband and wife. A clean fridge contains blood and gristle and bone. Ethereal and surgical, the film is an indictment of society, a meditation on trauma and desire.
Outside the emergency room doors, the feet of a bedraggled woman and a bitten bird. Orange petals scattered about the body. A wife, a lover, a daughter. Individuality is punished, for young girls in France and young wives in Seoul alike.
The purity of movement and the purity of beauty.
The same nightmares, rotting meat. A corpse in her arms.
Triggered by a blue mark on a woman’s backside: artistic inspiration and lustful intrigue. Allure and repulsion always come together.
Animal, mineral, vegetable. A man and a woman are one.
Plant, animal, human. A woman sprouting roots as a tree.
Perversity and pleasure. But whose?
Athina Rachel Tsangari adapts Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
A Stolichnaya bottle, a lemon, a rubber mouse. The contents of Varvara’s purse neatly on display. Russian 101.
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is a book about college and falling in love with an older but not always smarter boy. And yet this book is not like any other novel about college that you have ever read before. It is full of self-effacing humour and insightful commentary on the limits of language.
The college’s resident artist gesticulates wildly, rising on the balls of his feet. Power, sex, he shouts. Sex as power. Constructed Worlds.
The first person narrator named Selin, is a Turkish American/New Jerseyan freshman at Harvard. She observes her surroundings with a brut-dry sarcasm that is often anthropological. Rather than alienate the reader, her clipped considerations summon our empathy.
It takes nine sticks of gum to stay awake during the history of documentary. Nine gum wrappers outlaid on the table. A student dozes off, as does the instructor.
In her films, Tsangari prizes double talk, innuendo. The characters in Attenberg (2010) are suspicious of language, reluctant to use it – just like in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth (2010) they speak with enunciated determination. Speech patterns are stilted, and so too is anything corporeal. The central character Marina (Ariane Labed) walks in a dance-march, and approaches sex with either scientific curiosity or animal-like bewilderment.
Central to The Idiot – with its Dostoevskian title – is a Dostoevskian short story ‘Nina in Siberia’, a textbook language exercise that Selin encounters in class. Nina is unceremoniously ghosted by a man named Ivan who mysteriously goes to a Siberian farm for ‘work’. He leaves her a letter that provides no explanations and provokes more questions. Nina goes to Siberia herself to find out that he has married a woman named Galya and ends up studying reindeer. Selin and her classmates reenact the short story in beginner’s Russian. It is abundant with tenses and forms.
“I have a girlfriend whom I only sometimes love. I do think about you a
lot. My love for you is for the person writing your letters.” The flickering of overhead lights in the main cabin is another kind of language. A confrontation takes place between two monstrously tall humans beside an airplane lavatory. They look out onto the cabin, a sea of huddled blue fleece blankets.
Selin spends her summer in Hungary. The bildungsroman exquisitely reshapes itself into the tale of a girl alone on a summer vacation. This is my favourite micro-genre of film: the young woman alone on a summer vacation. In Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray, Éric Rohmer, 1986) Delphine whimpers along the French seaside; in Summertime (David Lean, 1955) Katharine Hepburn risks her dignity and retains it. Before going to Hungary, Selin goes to Paris. A view of the Musée d’Orsay from a rich aunt’s penthouse, a morning jog along the Seine. Tsangari could film a close-up of what looks like a very round pool of blood inside an orange vessel but which is actually a cantaloupe filled with port. Selin would take in all of the formative artistic viewing experiences (the Louvre, the Picasso, the Centre Pompidou) while seeking out irrelevant and extreme ones, like eating baguettes smeared with a lethal mustard that resembles nothing available in the States. During the following section of the film, the pithy dialogue would decrease as Tsangari trades campus and classroom for landscapes and nature. Tombs and crypts and fields of sunflowers in the Hungarian countryside. A man on the train eating raw garlic.
Perhaps Tsangari could tease out a food film from the novel, in which mini-meals and snacks become part of the decor. A three course lunch served daily in the supply closet of a school. Inky homemade wine and apple cake. A five-pound bag of cashews. Food items as absurd objects, denuded of traditional nutritional purpose.
Elissa Suh is a freelance writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in MUBI, IndieWire and more.