You wait sixty years* for a new film of Emile Zola's Therese Raquin and then two come along at once. No sooner has Charlie Stratton's reverent adaptation premiered at TIFF than the announcement arrives that Brian De Palma is starting work on his own version{
Zola's 1867 novel sees its eponymous orphan heroine railroaded into an unhappy marriage by her overbearing aunt, Madame Raquin. Chained to the feeble Camille, Therese begins an aggressive affair with the dashing Laurent, but its future is not a happy one, and there's murder afoot.
Stratton's film sticks close to source (with Elizabeth Olsen, Oscar Isaac, Tom Felton and Jessica Lange in the cast), but De Palma's approach sounds rather different. Described as a "very loose" adaptation of the material, he'll instead focus on a filmmaker directing a movie of the novel, where the cast all begin to find parallels between the story as written and their own real lives.
Emily Mortimer has the lead role - presumably as the actress playing Therese - in what sounds to us as if it might be somewhere vaguely along the lines of Michael Winterbottom's A Cock And Bull Story, which made similar hay with Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
There's no start date reported for the as-yet untitled De Palma project so far, and no UK release date as yet for Stratton's standard version, but we'll keep an eye on both.
*Unless you count Park Chan-wook's Thirst.