Thursday, June 18, 2020

Emily Temple's "The Lightness," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Lightness: A Novel by Emily Temple.

The entry begins:
The Lightness is a novel about a teenage girl who follows her missing father to a meditation center in the mountains—a place famous for its supposed connection to feats of levitation. She doesn’t find him there, but she does find a mysterious group of girls hell-bent on achieving transcendence (both literal and metaphysical) themselves. It’s a book about desire, obsession, magic, female friendships, bodies, and belief—and it includes a very strange scene involving menstrual blood. So obviously my dream director is Sofia Coppola. I imagine the final product being somewhere between The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, with just a hint of The Beguiled.

As far as casting goes, it’s tougher, because most of the main characters in the book are teenagers, and I admit that I am old and don’t know who the cool teenage actors are. But for Luke, the sexy, lecturing, possibly-enlightened gardener with a man bun, I can’t help but imagine Jared Leto. Luke’s in his early 20s, so Leto is much too old at this point (though who knows with Hollywood magic), but let’s say a Jared Leto type. Or maybe this is just because...[read on]


--Marshal Zeringue