Comparing Therese and Isabelle, Book and Movie

What I'm going to do here is compare the book version and the movie version of Therese and Isabelle. The book, of course, is divided into chapters and the movie is not, so comparing the two will be somewhat difficult but I'll do the best I can.

The book starts out with a lot of things that happen before the first event of the movie.

It's a Sunday and Isabelle, Therese and other girls are in the show-polishing room polishing their shoes.

Therese feels she has no future at the school.

School has been in session for around a month.

The parents of both girls are teachers but apparently not at that school.

Some of the courses the girls take are sewing, gymnastics and chemistry.

Isabelle kicks Therese's show brush away and Therese stuffs a rag into Isabelle's mouth.

There's a lot about how she hates I but it's obvious that it's not hate but the exact opposite.

I'm a little confused on the issue of bedrooms. It seems they sort of have their own or maybe it's larger room divided into sections?

The girls get a pitcher of water(so they can wash up a little when they get up; in the morning.

Therese is 17.

There's an evening inspection by the headmistress.

The morning bell is at 6:30 A.M.

Therese goes to Isabelle's 'room' where she kisses Isabelle and lays down with her.

Isabelle plays with Therese's crotch.

7:45 is breakfast time which seems to be just bread.

They they can study on their own from 8 to 8:30. The refectory gong rings. Isabelle acts ill but is faking it.

Later, in the lavatory Therese and Isabelle hold each other. Therese tells Isabelle about not wanting to be away from her.

Therese seems to come from a poor home. She's jealous of her mother getting re-married.

Therese is not a very good student.

Therese becomes totally obsessed with Isabelle. Another night the two of them are playing with each other when things get rather different as I Isabelle uses her hand in Therese's vagina and ends up breaking her hymen, the blood being the key to what happened.

Another time Therese performs oral sex on Isabelle.

Then there's the scene from the film where the two go to a 'house' and rent a room to have sex in but things don't work out as they didn't in the movie. This is one of the very rare times when the book and the movie become very similar.

They have another time where Therese performs oral sex on Isabelle

A short time later Therese's mother removes her from school and she never sees Isabelle again. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what happened in the movie.

There's various things in the book that were done done in the movie. This starts right off when in the movie Therese, now grown up, returns to the school and remembers things that happened. The book section where Isabelle apparently broke Therese's hymen, drawing blood was not in the movie. The shoe-polishing scene was also not in the movie.

Basically, the only things the book and the movie have in common is that the two girls went to the same school and did some sexual things together.

The question, of course, is why was so much changed? Why was the ending changed? Why was a good part of the book totally ignored in the making of the movie? Did the people making the movie think that doing the book fairly close to how it was written would not be interesting enough to the audience or might be considered past the border of acceptability?

It's also interesting to me that no colorized version of the movie was ever produced although I have seen some color photos that I guess were taken as photos and not film.


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