Rosamunde Pilcher for GenZ
In addition to children’s and youth films, there are now also films for “new” adults – Roger Krumble’s novel adaptation is one of them and surprises with unusual border crossings
In purely historical terms, literature naturally has a lot of experience ahead of film. So it’s no wonder that the old lady usually reacts a little more agile to new requirements or social and economic trends. Children’s and young people’s books, for example, existed long before film learned to serve this segment. It is therefore all the more interesting that the »bubblyisation« of our society, the ever-increasing fragmentation of our areas of life, has discovered a new target group of readers in recent years New Adultswhich is now finally mirrored in the film.
There have already been first attempts in the field of horror films, for example Bodies Bodies Bodies, which appeared last year and which almost philosophically deals with the problems of GenZi.e. the young adults born between 1990 and 2010, and let a lot of subculture resonate.
As the niche seems to be working well, there’s now one of the first mainstream try-balloons, the film adaptation of the New York Time bestseller Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire, who self-published from backcountry near Tulsa, Oregon, into the big, wide world, briefly switched to a major publisher, then went back to self-publishing because the profit margins are significantly better there.
Both McGuire’s novel and the superior film adaptation by Roger Krumble read and see themselves not much differently than the novels by Rosamunde Pilcher and their successful film adaptations, it is basically no different there than in the film adaptation of which is currently available in the ZDF media library When I find you againin which fate brings together boat builder Helen Brody and insurance agent Liam Shaw, although they couldn’t be more different.
In Beautiful Disaster it’s of course young people who are still in college. Is it the agile Abby Abernathy (Virginia Gardner) who turns her back on her home in Las Vegas to finally lead a normal life as a student far away from Vegas. Because in Vegas her father socialized her from an early age to become one of the most accomplished poker players: inside, but at the same time shouldered all the responsibility for life together on Abby’s shoulders. That’s why Abby doesn’t want to be in a relationship, she just wants to study with her best friend. But as is the case in life, love gets in her way and in the person of Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse), of all people, who finances his studies with martial art fights and who does not like Jean-Pierre Léaud in women Truffauts The American Night searches for its magical and mystical qualities, but takes what comes. And who then also looks like the young Tom Cruise.
The disposition is clear, the plot predictable. However, the adaptation of McGuire’s novel, which has meanwhile been published in three subsequent volumes, comes up with a few pleasant surprises – the journey is actually the reward here. Not only are there a few unusually open sex scenes, drug use and verbalized vulgarisms, which are all the more striking in our Biedermeier times, but the past catches up with the heroine in several ways, with consequences that are wonderfully dysfunctional Present a family picture as an alternative, a vision that contrasts pleasantly with the rest of US cinematic propaganda and its longing for a whole family.
The acting is also convincing, the longing for love, no matter how different the other person may be, is energetically transferred to the viewer and transformed into ticking time bombs of longing. A total package that should satisfy the young, white GenZ middle class of our western society, who don’t really know how they got into this life, and which is almost enough to get rid of McGuire’s dangerous, lateral thinking and ultra-conservative comments to shake off the corona crisis and the political situation in America and to neatly separate film and literature from their author.
Axel Timo Purr