Stefan Zweig wrote countless novels, poetry, plays, biographies, and essays. The Austrian author was a master when it came to portraying the contradictions of the human being, which is why his fictions are always very attractive to filmmakers. Letter from a stranger, for example, has been adapted on several occasions. The most famous version is that of 1948 by Max Ophüls, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan as protagonists, which is considered one of the essential films in the history of cinema.
More than 80 years have passed since Zweig's death but his books continue to be republished and film directors still find material for films in his writings that aspire to remain engraved in the viewer's retina. Bille August has turned well-known novels such as The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, Les Miserables, by Víctor Hugo, or the disturbing Miss Smila and Her Special Perception of Snow, by Peter Høeg, into films.
Now the talents of Zweig and August have come together in Impatience of the Heart, which is competing in the official section of the BCN Film Fest. “It is the story of a man who has too much compassion, who feels sorry for a woman and that makes him promise things that he cannot keep. That attracted me in a special way and made me fall in love with the novel ”, explains August in an interview given yesterday by zoom to La Vanguardia.
The story begins a few months before the outbreak of World War I in a barracks located on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Anton, a cavalry officer, comes into contact with a baron who lives in a castle located near the camp and befriends his daughter, Edith, a very pretty girl who was paralyzed in a riding accident.
Little by little, their friendship grows closer, because Anton feels sorry for the girl and, although he would prefer to do other things, he continues to visit her: "Anton is a brave and honorable soldier, but he experiences an internal conflict when he meets this disabled woman, because he doesn't know how to deal with the situation, neither with her nor with his comrades in the barracks, who consider it unworthy to marry a girl who can't walk”, explains August. The compassion that Anton feels for Edith leads him to deceive and even leads him to dishonor: "It's the curious thing about it, that compassion, which is considered a value, can end up becoming a problem, an obstacle," he adds.
For the director, who also signed the script with Greg Latter, “the most difficult thing was to concentrate the adaptation on the compassion element, which is what I was passionate about, and leave everything else out. In addition, the story had to be condensed to make it into a film, because if you take a novel and simply move it, you would end up with mere illustrated literature”.
The project began to take shape as an international production, but "there were legal problems and it was stopped." "At that point I was already so in love with the story that I decided to shoot it in Denmark," says the director, who chose the protagonist Clara Rosager in a casting process. The actress is not known in Spain and "the truth is that she is not famous in Denmark either", but she has already attracted the attention of critics for her portrayal of Edith and for "her ability to embody the ambiguity of the character and what it provokes in Anton, who is torn between grief and his love for her."
Working in Denmark is “a pleasure” for August because “in Danish cinema there is a very good atmosphere, we share things and we are colleagues, we help each other and we watch each other's films”. Perhaps for this reason, and also for the work of August, who has an Oscar and two Palme d'Ors to his credit, the Danish audiovisual industry has carved a niche for itself on the international scene.
Films and, above all, series from the country are screened all over the world. August, who had already filmed some television series, will premiere his first work for Netflix in September: “The platforms are here and we have no choice but to accept them, it hurts me that they hurt theaters, but we are storytellers and we have to keep counting them”, he concludes.
