On a fictional island off the coast of England, a married woman and doctor returns to the places of her past. And the locals see her as the ominous bird. The novel L’Island of Thirty Coffins by Maurice LeBlanc dates from 1917.
It is Virginie Ledoyen who embodies the heroine, renamed Christine. She loves this fantasy genre: “It’s my first fantasy series. It’s a genre that I love, because it allows you to play with codes. It’s mysterious, there’s a lot of psychology, I loved not only interpreting the character of Christine, but also being in this strange, particular universe, certainly a little dark, but at the same time, it seems to me that it is also a strong love story.
In this new adaptation of L’Island of Thirty Coffins, the decor remains timeless. insularity. Bearded sailors smoke pipes at the bar. And the houses are swept away by the wind. The writers completely changed the narrative. And plunge into fantastic cinema with murders galore. This is what interested Virginie Ledoyen.
“I find that often the fantastic approaches in a very indirect and a little spooky way characteristic human traits, strong and societal.”
Virginia Ledoyenat franceinfo
“In this case, there is a prophecy in the series, continues Virginie Ledoyen, when she arrives on this island, she is like a kind of bird of bad omen, and because she would arrive, she would be the famous dead, a ghost, and his coming would cause the death of thirty people, hence the title ‘The Island of Thirty Coffins’.
Indeed, it’s an island, it’s insular, everyone has always known each other, everyone knows everyone’s life, and at the same time there is a kind of pack effect: it has a whole island following him. We might transpose it into: we burn what we adored.
This new adaptation is not the most modern. The side effects are big. But we bathe with pleasure on this imaginary island and we are not at the end of its surprises. It’s from tomorrow, Monday March 21, on France 2, and now available on Salto. As for the original version from the 70s, with Claude Jade, it is available on the video platform of theINA.
