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One often hears a conversation of this sort: “Have you read Anna Karenina?” (Tolstoy 1952 [1878]) “No, but I saw the movie,” or in this case, “Have you read The Elegance of the Hedgehog?” “No, but I saw the movie.” The response is as absurd as it appears natural; at least, it avoids the question of the connections between the book and the film, leaving the impression that the film is equivalent to the book, something that all evidence would suggest is erroneous. Generally speaking, the problematic of the relationship between a book and a film that is adapted from it is as old as cinema itself, so I will only underscore two points. Firstly, a book is entirely capable of expressing the characters’ flow of consciousness and their associations, whereas this is more challenging for a film and demands a certain level of sophistication on the part of the director. Consequently, a film has more of a tendency to emphasize the narrative and the frame. The second point is that the characters, décor etc. that appear on screen are not necessarily compatible with those imagined by a viewer who had also read the novel, an incompatibility that may have the effect of making it difficult for the viewer to fully enter into the aesthetic illusion (Kris 1952). The question is particularly pertinent in considering the connections between the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the film Le hérisson, which I will come back to.
The film, released in 2009, is the first full-length work by the director Mona Achache. It is a free adaptation of the book by philosopher and author Muriel Barbery, published in 2006 (Barbery 2006). The director understood that the success of the book—an extraordinary success, as the book had won five literary prizes and that same year was translated into 34 languages—carried the film, and she had reason to fear the reaction of viewers who had read the book. Le hérisson, however, is her film, and more specifically her point of view about