It was my third day in Londen (in september 2012) when I walked into a bookshop and saw a book that I wanted to read just because I liked the cover so much. Its titel was The perks of being a wallflower, written by Stephen Chbosky, a man I had never heard of before. The back cover told me it was some kind of coming-of-age story about a boy named Charlie, who is afraid to start highschool because he hasn’t got any friends and isn’t really the popular kid. If the story turned out to be bad, at least I had the cover to look at.
Not that much later, I noticed big commercials on buses and in the tube that showed the titel of my beautiful little book. Apparently the movie adaptation would be in the theaters soon, with Emma ‘Hermione’ Watson in one of the leading roles. I thought, well, if they decidedo make a film out of it, it cannote that bad. And – indeed – it wasn’t that bad at all.
I must confess that it was the first english novel I had ever read but I read it fluently. I even thought about it during the day when I was doing other stuff. And that’s the sign a book is worth reading! You just get to know the main character so well that you start to feel sorry for him when things go wrong. Lots of the things that happen to Charlie just sound familiar, even though some are a bit unreal. I just have one big remark: I understand that Charlie still suffers from all the things that have happended to him and his aunt when he was a little kid, but the fact that his best friend committed suicide just a few months before the beginning of the narrations hardly mentioned as an incident that changed his life. In the movie, this storyline gets ignored even more. I don’t think Stephen Chbosky has ever talked to someone that has lostis best friend recently.
The movie was good, nothing special in fact. It just tells the same story than the book but it’s a different way of narration and it eliminates some storylines. Sometimes it seemed like they were just reading out loud from the book so the characters lacked some spontaneity. And I don’t like Emma Watson, but I liked the guy who played Patrick (Ezra Miller). He must be gay in real life too. Or he’s just a good actor. The leading role was reserved for Leman Lorman. In the movie he’s the uncool kid, but I would have fallen in love with his pretty face when I was fifteen. Unfortunately, the whole stayed a bit on the surface, although I believe the filmmakers tried to put some poetical depth in it, but it just didn’t come naturally.
As usual, the book was better.
Celine Vervaet 