Rabat – The film adaptation of Leila Slimani’s Goncourt-winning novel, “Chanson Douce,” is set to hit the big screens on November 27, a recently released trailer has indicated.
While the movie adaptation of the novel had already been announced as in project, it was unclear who the actors would be and how similar the film version would be to the enchanting horror that made the book such a big success.
But the trailer, which features actress Karina Viard magisterially personifying Louise, the complex nanny figure at the heart of the novel’s bitter-sweet reflection on motherhood, marriage, love, and Parisian life in general, appears set to echo the novel’s elusively engrossing drama.
Added to Viard’s masterful personification of Louise is the combination of the talented Leïla Bekhti and the Cesar-winning Antoine Reinartz, playing the role of husband and wife, parents and bosses of the disgruntled, deceptively angelic Louise.
Rabat-born Slimani started her career as a reporter for Francophone magazine Jeune Afrique, writing on social issues (especially women’s rights and the intersection of religion and cultural mores) in North Africa.
After taking a break from journalism to focus on and hone her creative writing, Slimani hit France’s bookshelves in 2014 with her promising debut novel, Le Jardin de l’ogre (In the Garden of the Ogre).
But it was her 2016 novel, Chanson Douce (translated into English as Perfect Nanny in America, and Lullaby in Britain) which definitely shot her star in the skies of Franco-Moroccan and world literature. The book’s “artfully calculated prose” was central in many readers and reviewers’ favorable view of Slimani’s writing.
“Leila Slimani doesn’t care if you’re uncomfortable,” one literary reporter recently wrote, speaking of the agonizingly pleasant texture of Chanson Douce. American feminist and writer Roxane Gaye echoed that sentiment in her review of the novel. Chanson Douce, Gaye wrote, “is incredibly engaging and disturbing . . . You read the entire novel knowing something terrible is coming. In that, Slimani has us in her thrall.”
With such wildly positive, A-rate reviews of the novel, it remains to be seen whether the film adaptation, whose talented crew suggests a certain desire to duplicate the same special effects, similar critical acclaim, will be as artful and irresistible as Slimani’s celebrated minimalist prose.
