Waiting for Hugo
Translated by William Moritz
Although The Hunchback of Notre Dame was reviewed by William Moritz, we thought it would be interesting to also get the reaction of a leading Victor Hugo scholar when it opened in France in late November. Arnaud Laster is not only a leading authority on Hugo, he has also written extensively on poet Jacques Prévert, whose prolific screenwriting career even encompassed animation.
When you love, as I do, the novel Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, what can you expect from its adaptation by the Disney Studios under the traditional English-language title The Hunchback of Notre Dame? I should specify up front that I have just seen the animated feature once, and in a dubbed French version, which is the only way you can see it in Paris, since no theater offers the original version (meaning that the distributors foresee an audience primarily of children, and in no case of adult movie fans). Now it is not inconceivable to interest an exacting adult audience in an animated feature: the success of the masterpiece by Jacques Prévert and Paul Grimault Le Roi et l'oiseau (The King and Mr. Bird) proved that.
To go immediately to the main point, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as I discovered, seems much less an adaptation from the Hugo novel than from a cinematic predecessor, the famous American version directed by William Dieterle in 1939. The music behind the titles already gives the first clue. The function of the Judge devolved onto Frollo, whose original status as Archdeacon is again transferred to a benevolent ecclesiastic, is a second one. You will note that in 1996 everything is still done as if it were impossible to present a priest character who does wrong. This self-censorship robs the work of one of its strongest tensions: the monstrosity of Frollo results in effect from the repression caused by the enforced obligation of continence and celibacy imposed on clergy by the Catholic church. Victim of this interdict, horrified by his own sexuality, he can no longer bear to witness that of others and persecutes Love; the cry of the flesh is so imperious that he makes recourse to blackmail, becomes guilty of attempted rape and, being' unable to possess the object of his desire, ends by rejoicing in seeing Esmeralda delivered to the executioner. We bet that concern about sparing children the evocation of such torments is opportunistically added to the preoccupation with not shocking the devotees of a religion that is still powerful in the United States and elsewhere. The obsession of Frollo nonetheless inspires one sequence that I found aesthetically the most beautiful and which, exceptionally, uses with talent the specific resources of animation: that in which flames escaping from a chimney near the redoutable judge form the image of Esmeralda.
The makers of the animated feature have clung faithfully to the Dieterle film in which the respect for him whom the media still often call "The Holy Father" leads to crowning Quasimodo not (as in Hugo) the "Pope of Fools" but rather the "King of Fools". On the other hand, they did not keep the King Louis XI of Dieterle's film, who is idealized to the point of becoming the bearer of Hugo's own convictions, which constitutes not only a violation of the character in the novel but also a transgression against Hugo's own anti-monarchy tendencies which were already strong at the time he Wrote Notre-Dame. They have substituted for him a sort of sovereign of the Court of Miracles, Clopin Trouillefou, in whom they invested the function of narrator, which he hardly merits. Furthermore they have given him the appearance of a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac, such as Edmond Rostand caricatured him, and it is this rather un-Gothic silhouette that stars on the film's posters, a sort of unwitting anti-publicity. Hugo himself did quite the opposite in his own adaptation of the novel to an opera libretto (music by Louise Bertin): he made Clopin the accomplice of Frollo.
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