Adaptation as art and life: Lisa Owens on the dog days of lockdown

• Days of the Bagnold Summer review: can two awkward loners make a family?

Last year I heard an interview with the writer David Sedaris, in which he spoke about the experience of watching a screen adaptation of one of his memoirs. “I’m the only person in the world who can’t watch it,” he said, meaning he kept tripping up over minor, incidental details that would be distracting only to him. The fridge was in the wrong place; in fact the whole kitchen layout was not quite right. It was all just slightly off.

This idea stayed with me in the months before the release of Days of the Bagnold Summer, a film based on Joff Winterhart’s critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same title, for which I wrote the screenplay. I was wondering how it might be for Joff to watch it, and how fans of the book would receive it – the graphic novel tends to inspire an instant, fierce and committed affection in its readers. It certainly did in me.

Adaptations are often evaluated in terms of their ‘faithfulness’ to the source material, a highly subjective criteria that for one person could involve as literal a transposition as possible, and for another something more ineffable, to do with capturing the spirit or the tone of the original. The job of the adaptor-screenwriter (that there is not a more streamlined term for this pursuit speaks volumes) is itself really a further mash-up of roles, something like (and if you thought adaptor-screenwriter was awkward, buckle up) custodian-curator-creator, where every decision taken involves weighing loyalty to the original against what best serves the new work.

Days of the Bagnold Summer tells the story of Daniel Bagnold, a 15-year old metalhead and his single mum Sue, whose summer plans – six weeks in Florida and six weeks of blissful solitude, respectively – implode when Daniel’s father cancels his trip, forcing them to spend the school holidays together at home.

What had initially served as a low-key plot catalyst has come to feel in recent months bizarrely relevant, as carefully-laid plans the world over have collapsed, confining individuals to the limits – and extremes – of their own households.

I have been struck during this period by the sense that cinema (and all art, really) is experienced via a process of adaptation, where the ever-shifting circumstances of the wider world, or an individual’s life, can radically alter their response or relationship to a film. Where details or situations or subjects that might at one point seem incidental (summer holiday plans being cancelled) or like pure science fiction (à la Contagion) suddenly take on a poignant or powerful relevance.

The world looks a lot like it used to, but there are little tells all over the place that it is profoundly different: kitchen-table offices, cordoned-off water fountains, panicked pavement dances when people err too close. And while this situation evolves indefinitely, we continue to adapt, preserving what is salvageable from our pre-Covid existences, and re-fashioning those pieces into something else: recognisable, yet changed.

We have all this year become intimate with the art of adaptation, in a time when life as we knew it has been disrupted and dismantled by the Covid-19 pandemic. Like David Sedaris seeing his not-quite-kitchen on screen, we are all currently living our own not-quite-lives.