"She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her breasts. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste. Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his shirt.
Come on, please, please, she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a whore might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention.
She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her passion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, 'Yes'..."
Birdsong, about one man’s intense experiences of the extremes of both love and war, has become a bona fide modern literary classic. A bestseller since its 1993 publication, it was also voted Britain’s 13th favourite book in the BBC’s Big Read poll. Now, nearly 20 years since it was first published, at last Sebastian Faulks’s First World War novel has reached the screen. Thankfully the final result, BBC One’s two-part version, the first episode of which will premiere on this Sunday, does the book proud, writes The Telegraph's Serena Davies.
A cast blessed with devastating good looks, including Burberry model Eddie Redmayne and In Bruges’s Clémence Poésy, sensitively plays out Faulks’s tale of a love affair that straddles the cataclysm of the Great War. Scriptwriter Abi Morgan, who also has two major films opening this month with The Iron Lady and Shame, has spliced the love story that takes place largely before the war, in 1910, with episodes from the conflict itself. These sharp shifts from the lyrical and languid scenes of hero Stephen Wraysford (Redmayne) and his French love Isabelle Assaire’s (Poésy) romance, to the mud and blood of the trenches where Stephen later finds himself, movingly juxtapose the optimism of passion with the despair of war. “This book is about the most extreme things you can experience in life,” comments director Philip Martin. “Either in love or war, everything is 10 out of 10.”
29-year-old French actress Poésy hadn’t read the book before she met director Martin, but when she did she fell in love with the story. “Birdsong isn’t as big in France as it is in England, but when I spoke to my English friends about the book I found that they were completely obsessed by it," she admitted. "I had no idea it was such a modern classic, so when I read it myself I thought, oh my god! It’s a brilliant story about love, passion, life at its peak and then death. I think it explores such extremes and describes them beautifully and so truthfully. The characters are very modern and you don’t really realise that you’re in a period drama. That’s what we tried to get across when filming.”
She says she loved playing Isabelle. "She is someone who has been very unhappy for a very long time and is trying to find happiness wherever she can — a happiness that’s not in her marriage," she told TV Choice. "She hasn't got many friends. She is a lonely woman. And she has these two children to look after who she loves a lot. And she’s trying to make this house nice. She’s artistic and very close to nature. And open to seeing beauty in small things and is trying to fill her life with that. Then Stephen arrives and all of a sudden she doesn’t need all that — she just needs him. When such a connection happens, it’s like going back to nature, like to the nature of what you are. There’s a description in the book where she says when she is making love to him, she feels like that is what she was made for. And it’s blinding her from her reality because that’s all there is."Although Isabelle eventually leaves Stephen, when they meet there is an incredible connection between the two characters. “I think the reason Isabelle is drawn to Stephen is because he listens to her, he treats her like his equal. There is a prominent sexual chemistry between them, which is hard to explain and although not all love stories are about passion, Stephen and Isabelle’s is. It’s about a strong sexual connection between two people. There is a great sense of freedom that this passion brings to her life. Like Stephen, it’s probably the first time Isabelle has had any connection with anyone, as her life with her husband is quite miserable. I think women have that thing at some point in their life that makes them feel like a woman and this is Isabelle’s moment for that."
A lot of First World War literature focuses on the huge change that society goes through as a result of the war. In Birdsong Stephen and Isabelle are not only changed by the war, but they are also transformed by meeting each other. “The people we meet in life and the loves of our life are very, very important in terms of what or who we become. Change when it is right is probably for the best, but I think when Isabelle leaves Stephen she probably goes on to become more depressed than she was before she met him. I think Stephen is changed in a different way to Isabelle. He is a beautiful character because he is moved by love and by life and he is changed deeply by his experience in the trenches."
Poésy says there was one scene where she and Eddie "freaked out about for a long time", when Isabelle and Stephen see each other again after years apart and then they have one big goodbye scene together. "I was very scared about trying to get it right," she said. "It was extremely weird for me when Eddie showed up on set as he brought the war with him. It was very impressive, because all the time I was looking at this person that I had been acting with for a few weeks and it wasn’t him anymore, it was someone else. He had become that soldier and it was as if he was bringing a third character into the room with him, and that character was the war. Anyone who has gone through that trauma lives with it, so although I think Stephen is changed by Isabelle, he is also made a completely different man by what he has seen. He has witnessed people dying and he has watched what men can do to each other. It is seeing how love can help and hatred can destroy.”
With such a hard-hitting book, surely the whole experience was emotionally draining? "As an actor it’s part of the job to play with your emotions, but I was actually surprised by some of the scenes," confides Poésy. "There were certain points that became really intense when we were shooting them. Like one scene where Stephen and Isabelle touch ankles for the first time on a rowing boat; while we were shooting it I just couldn’t stop crying. It was really weird. I had no idea it was going to go there."
It is the moment, of course, where Faulks' hero and heroine make their first fleeting, physical contact. In the formal, stuffy, stuffed-shirt atmosphere of the Azaire household, Stephen and Isabelle's growing feelings for each other have hitherto been played out in stolen glances and tremulous gulps. But as they boat along the river in that "interminable heat", their ankles graze together. It's an electrifying and ominous moment, and not just because of the sign we see on the edge of the river: we are in the département de la Somme. "These scenes between Clémence and Eddie are all about the danger their characters are walking into," offers cinematographer Julian Court. "And by putting them under the trees and using the shadows and having them almost silhouetted, we're trying to visually suggest that jeopardy."
"I want to recalibrate what is sexual," Martin adds. "We want to take the audience back to a time when a touch was an extremely dangerous and provocative and erotic thing." For Isabelle and Stephen, that touch of skin on skin lets the genie out of the bottle. Their affair is incendiary, entirely based around explosive passion. In one memorable passage in the book, Faulks writes in graphic detail of the "sex act" (to use the normal newspaper euphemism) the Englishman performs on the Frenchwoman. "As a young man reading the book, for me that was an incredibly erotic scene," a chuckling Redmayne told The Independent. The actor, now 30, was an adolescent at the time he read the 1993 novel, "and a lot of my friends were blown away by it. We have a responsibility to this book, but in some ways doing that scene [properly] is also a massive responsibility."
Poésy had no time to duck that responsibility – she and Redmayne filmed the scene on her first day on set. Was that a deliberate choice on her part? "No, no, no, no," the Parisian actress, 29, says emphatically. "I looked at the schedule and I was, like, 'Really, are we going there already?' But then there was that thought of, OK, well at least it's out of the way. And of course it wasn't – we had to go back to it every single week because we never finished it that day! But it needed to be done properly. And it's weird because I try to avoid those scenes. I had a policy against things like that as I had a bad experience." (Aged 18, Poésy appeared in a French film in which, against her better judgement, she shot a topless scene.) "But I think every actress says that, then you grow old, then you really don't give a shit."
The novel is famous for its sexual content, so was it hard filming some of those more racy scenes? "We had three days of rehearsals in London and talked those scenes over and over. I could really confide in Eddie and we were both very lucky because we were totally at ease with Philip Martin the director, which is a huge deal because if you’re not, those scenes can become a nightmare," Poésy told Stylist magazine. "If viewers knew what actors go through when shooting scenes like that, they’d never find them sexy; it’s all very technical. But we were very conscious that we had to make them work. So even though I normally try to escape nudity, for the first time in my life, we added more sex scenes. We really wanted to get it right."
"Those couple of days of rehearsal in London were crucial," agrees Redmayne, not least because they weren't filming chronologically. "We'd talked through the script with Philip - we talked about the sex scenes and the love, so I at least had it in my mind as I was playing the war stuff and looking back. Clémence and I both just jumped into it - it was a really quick shoot. We went out one night early on and got pretty pissed together - we went through our disastrous moments in various love lives, and it was quite a good way of getting to trust each other! When you're that exposed, basically spending quite a lot of time half-naked on top of each other, you need to have some trust!"
Morgan is keen to explain her juxtaposition of these love scenes with the harsher realities of the war. "I think [the story] is about the violence of a love affair," she insisted to Cult Box. "The drama shows the violence hidden in love - and the sex scenes of 1910 have a rawness that I couldn't have shown if I was adapting Faulks' story twenty years ago - by the same token the war scenes are surprisingly tender."
Stephen and Isabelle clearly have an amazing chemistry and Eddie and Clémence certainly bring this chemistry to life on screen. "What was great about Eddie is that he didn’t avoid the subject of the love scenes – we always felt we could talk to each other about them," said Poésy. Being completely scared before a scene is good though. It means that it isn’t just a regular sex scene that you have in other films; I felt that we were more ourselves. Philip insisted on spending a proper amount of time on the scenes and he stopped directing us at points, which was terrifying, hopefully they are okay though. I suppose filming the scenes with Eddie made the job a bit easier, but it still wasn’t easy. Eddie makes everyone feel really special though. He’s lovely, gentle and genuinely interested in everyone. He’s great -he’s got everything that guy, it’s a bit annoying really."
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