L'humeur vagabonde (11/13)"I should have realized from the beginning: the first time I saw her, the evening she landed on the island with my mother and appeared in the French window blinded by jet lag and the sunset, everything matched up, everything coincided. We were already unknowingly repeating the first scene in that old book by James that, like all American students, I had read in college a few years earlier. At the time I didn't get it. But now I'm sure of it: her personality, her life, her travels, her friends, the men that loved her, the man she married, her children, her sorrows, it was all written, imagined a century ago. I am not superstitious. I'm not crazy. I don't believe in destiny. But hers repeats to the letter that of a character in a novel that she had never even read. And which ends with my death - I mean the death of my model, Ralph. As for her, the heroine, we don't know what becomes of her. But I may be able to foil this sort of misfortune. I don't have much time, I know what I have to do."
On L'humeur vagabonde, Kathleen Evin calls L'Excuse a "literary, love and linguistic thriller. The narrator, Lise, returns at the end of her life to a beautiful house on Martha's Vineyard where as a young woman she'd had a secret passion for her cousin Nick who had an incurable disease. There she finds a posthumous manuscript in which he has told their story, in parallel with the one written by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady."
James said that the best scene in his book consisted of Isabel sitting motionless in a chair. This is why the movie fell so short of telling the story. It will be interesting to see how Wolkenstein reproduces James' action.
