MR BARNES GOES TO THE CINEMA

After 18 years, the film industry has discovered Julian Barnes (below). One of his novels reaches the screen this week, and another is close behind. Tim de Lisle talks to the author and goes on location in Paris to piece together a very Barnesian story

ONE BLUSTERY day two years ago, a scene unfolded on the English Channel which was straight from a Julian Barnes novel.

A film crew boarded a ferry in Calais, to shoot a sequence for a movie. Being French, the film was about an eternal triangle. Being a film crew, they needed lots of takes, so they disembarked at Dover, reboarded, and returned to France. Then they sailed back to England.

Landing at Dover again, they were met at the quay by Barnes (latest book: Cross Channel), who joined them on their fourth crossing of the day.

Where Barnes is concerned, there is usually a twist. In this case it's that he himself is the author of the story that was being filmed. His novel Talking It Over (1991), often likened to the French film Jules et Jim, was being made into a French film, with a French director, French stars, including Charlotte Gainsbourg, a French script, a French setting and French characters - not Stuart, Oliver and Gill but Benoit, Pierre and Marie. The only thing that stayed in English was the title, though it too was changed, to Love Etc. So the scene was straight from a Barnes novel - and wasn't.

Barnes was introduced to the adaptor, the highly rated young director Marion Vernoux.

"I hope you've betrayed me," he said.

She smiled and replied, "Yes of course!"

THIS MONTH Love Etc reaches British screens, complete with subtitles. It could only happen to Barnes, who is to the Channel what Evelyn Waugh was to Oxford. In his masterpiece, Flaubert's Parrot, the English hero pursues his obsession with Flaubert by criss-crossing the Channel like a film crew. In his first novel, the prize-winning Metroland, the hero (Chris) crosses the Channel as a postgraduate, lives in Paris, writes a thesis on "The Importance of British Styles of Acting in the Paris Theatre, 1789-1850", and has a textbook first love affair with a gorgeous Parisienne ("alas, that part's not autobiographical," Barnes says). In Cross Channel, a whole volume exploring the minefield where the British meet the French, the final story, Tunnel, is set on the Eurostar, which is also where Barnes's British publisher, Picador, held the launch for the paperback. In Talking It Over, the two characters who end up together go and live near Toulouse, although, in another Barnesian twist, this scene has been cut from the film.

As well as being a Francophile, Barnes is a cinephile. His second novel, Before She Met Me, is about a film buff's descent into retrospective jealousy. Chris in Metroland goes to a film about once every three pages, and nonchalantly informs us that he "called in on the Howard Hawks season which is always playing somewhere in Paris". Barnes himself, asked if he is a buff, says, "Oh yes. I love the cinema." He was a television critic for a decade, and has written two unfilmed screenplays, adaptations of two little-known novels by other people. Yet Love Etc is the first film to be made of his work.

Time for another twist: the second is already in the can - an adaptation of Metroland (1980). You wait 18 years for a film of a Julian Barnes novel, and then two come along at once.

THAT DELAY is partly down to the fact that these

are small European films, pushed to the back of the queue by Hollywood. Metroland will finally open in September, 20 months after the director, the British veteran Philip Saville, last shouted "Cut!". An estimated 40 per cent of British films never open in Britain, because the distributors are either owned by Hollywood or reluctant to look beyond it. A cultural scandal, this may also be, on the evidence of The Full Monty, a commercial error.

Love Etc, shot in 1996, endured a similar wait in this country, although it quickly found an opening in Paris, where I saw it 14 months ago. Unable to understand much of the dialogue, I sat back and enjoyed the rest - the design, the music, and above all the acting. Charlotte Gainsbourg can convey two emotions with her mouth before she even opens it, and the two men, though less well-known, are not outshone. Charles Berling from Ridicule is Pierre, the loquacious one who suffers from high self-esteem; Yvan Attal, who won a Cesar for A World Without Pity, is Benoit, big in the beam and shy with women. The fact that Attal lives with Gainsbourg in real life adds a certain je ne sais quoi.

The day before, I had been on the set of a film that was shooting in Paris: Metroland. Another scene was being played out that seemed to have Barnes written all over it. It was bitterly cold, and in one of Paris's most Parisian squares, the Jardin du Palais Royal, two young actors and an actress - Emily Watson, taking a break from collecting awards for Breaking the Waves - were playing cricket, with a baguette as the bat. Barnes likes cricket, and it crops up in his books: in Cross Channel, a story hinges on an 18th-century match between an English team and a French one. But he didn't actually put a cricket match in Metroland.

It was added by the adaptor, Adrian Hodges (screenwriter on Tom & Viv), and turns out to be the least of the changes. The book is a rites-of-passage tale in three equal parts, set in 1963, when Chris is 16 and living at the quiet end of the Metropolitan Line, in 1968, when he is in Paris and spectacularly failing to witness the riots, and in 1977, when he is back in suburbia, with a wife and child, somewhere between Middle Youth, as the marketing people now call it, and the mid-life crisis. The film- makers have dumped all but a couple of scenes of the first section. They have turned Chris, symbolically, from a thesis-writer into a photographer. In the book he is interested in classical music and art; in the film, the galleries have been banished and the prevailing music is rock (though well done, and not without a twist of its own: the main theme for 1977 is Dire Straits' "Sultans of Swing", while the composer of the film's score is Mark Knopfler). In the book, Chris and his best male friend Toni, each as Francophile as his creator, like nothing better than to epater la bourgeoisie, as they see it, by delivering gauchely sophisticated one-liners to men in bowler hats. This gets into the film, just, but the boys don't say to each other, triumphantly, "an epat, I think": they congratulate each other on "sticking it up the bourgeoisie's fat com- placent bum".

The film has been made, after all these years, through the persistence and enthusiasm of An-drew Bendel, a 35-year-old producer who began as researcher to Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I), then joined the BBC, before setting up on his own to make films like this. Metroland had been optioned at the time (1980) by the BBC, and a script was written for a single television drama, but it was never made. Bendel took out a separate option seven years ago, and spent much of that time raising the budget, which is pounds 2.8m - modest, but not tiny. It came from no fewer than seven sources, including the National Lottery, Canal Plus in France, a Spanish agency called Sogepaq ("for a time, the Parisian bits were going to be set in Madrid," notes Barnes), as well as - let's twist again - the BBC.

If seven years seems a long time, it is no more than Julian Barnes took to write the book - "it's shameful, isn't it?". He started at the age of 27, and spent years writing and rewriting the first section. In the process, he says, he became a novelist, so that the other two sections broke free from autobiography; hence the rueful non-admission about the affair. By the time he finished, he was 34. He's now 52.

Barnes and his agent, Pat Kavanagh (also his wife), let Bendel have the option for peanuts: Barnes thinks that for certain six-month extensions the rate was pounds 1. The Bendel-Hodges version went through various incarnations; at first they had three actors playing Chris, then two, then one - Christian Bale, the Bournemouth boy whose career has somehow survived landing a starring role in Spielberg's Empire of the Sun long before GCSEs.

All the time, the book was being simplified. "Where the book veers towards the - in quotes - intellectual," Bendel says, from deep inside a skiing jacket on a Palais Royal bench, "we try to veer to the emotional. The book has this cool irony which doesn't work in the cinema. You've got to engage people."

"Yeah, there have been a lot of changes done," says Christian Bale, safely back in his hotel. "Hardcore Julian Barnes fans will probably huff and puff about it. But there were times in the book when I really wanted to slap the character round the face 'cause he was trying to be so clever."

AT THIS point, never mind the fans, the author might well be huffing and puffing. Graham Greene, Barnes says, complained about nearly every adaptation of his novels, except those he did himself. But Barnes himself is famous for his good manners, and his amused detachment. "Greene always seemed to be missing the point a bit. The novels are there to be transformed. My attitude has always been, you can't sell your books to the movies and then complain."

You certainly won't catch him criticising the change of title to Love Etc: he actually dreamt it up, but changed it at the last minute when he heard that another novel had come out in America under that name. Nor does he mind that Marion Vernoux has come up with a new ending. "It's a completely plausible way to end the story."

He was naturally delighted with the prospect of a French film. "The French can make what one might call love-triangle films with rather more elan and originality than we can."

The most famous being Jules et Jim. "It's funny how that's rather got stuck to Talking It Over," Barnes says, genially of course. "It's probably behind the film more than the book. I certainly didn't think of myself as being inspired by Jules et Jim when I wrote the novel."

But it is mentioned. On page 22 Stuart tells the reader : "It was like that French film where they all go bicycling together." On page 23 Oliver follows up: "Let me guess. Jules et Jim? Am I right?"

"The reason I put it in," Barnes says, "is because it's the sort of cultural reference-point that Oliver goes in for, and as a hint to the reader about how things are going to turn out. I suppose I miscalculated really, because it's read as an indication that you are reworking this thing when you have no intention of doing so. I think the French publisher referred to Jules et Jim on the back, and lots of critics picked up on it. It does no harm," he concludes, with the merest trace of exasperation.

Jules et Jim also pops up in Metroland. "Really?" Page 112. "Hang on, I'll get it."

His voice, always mellifluous, goes up an octave. "Oh yes. 'In a month together they had become inseparable. I made the natural comparison with Jules et Jim.' God, I'm clearly obsessed with this film, and put it in all my books, and don't realise that it's a severe influence."

Barnes has seen both films, and - guess what - he likes them. But again there are gradations of tone. Love Etc is adjudged "good" and "very well acted". Metroland is only "quite good", and Barnes's praise for the cast is selective: "I thought they were all good, but the two women stole it." They are Emily Watson, "who of course is superb"as the wife, and the French actress Elsa Zylberstein (from Mina Tannenbaum), "who's fantastic" as the fabulous first love. Just as France returns Barnes's affections, making him the first Briton to win two of its leading literary prizes, so does Zylberstein. "I love his books," she says, with more than the required level of gush. "So wise, so human, so intimate, so funny."

Note the adjectives: she didn't say clever. British critics are always going on about Barnes's cleverness, and are apt to consider it a weakness. Listening to Andrew Bendel and Christian Bale, I had wondered if Metroland was going to be dumbed down. In fact, something subtly different has happened: the story has been pared down, and therefore warmed up.

What both films show is that if you strip away some of Barnes's clever stuff, as the cinema has to, you are left with different clever stuff - with emotional intelligence, applied to everyday situations. The reason Bendel has fought for seven years to bring Metroland to the screen is that "it's about something we can all relate to - being rebellious and artistic when you're young, and then ending up at 30-something, married with a kid in suburbia, and a steady job, and yet being quite content. That's a very common experience."

Christian Bale's Chris, not macho but still very male, articulate without being communicative, emerges as a hero for our time, a middle-class everyman - a Nick Hornby kind of guy. Hornby, of course, was still in tight football shorts when Barnes started winning literary prizes.

I put the point to Barnes. "Aahh," he said, like a very polite wounded animal. "Hm. Why don't you say Nick Hornby's heroes are Metroland heroes?"

"I'm not actually accusing you of being influenced by him."

The celebrated courtesy finally cracks. "Well that's a bloody relief."

'Love Etc' (15) opens Fri. 'Metroland' follows in Sept.