While Sylvia touched on its creation, Sylvia Plath’s seminal work of American fiction The Bell Jar has had a surprisingly low-key afterlife on the big screen – one so-so 1979 adaptation aside. Until now, that is. Kirsten Dunst has taken the task on as her directorial debut, and has signed up Dakota Fanning in the lead role.
Plath’s 1963 novel was published in the year of her untimely death and tells a heavily autobiographical tale of a glamorous creative lifestyle backdropped by depression and constant therapy. It’s not an easy read but remains a powerful, profound and unsparingly honest one, qualities that Dunst’s take will hope to tap into.
Fanning will play Esther Greenwood, a young magazine intern in the Big Apple in the 1950s. Retreating to her home town of Boston, she suffers a breakdown and experiences a depression that she likens to the suffocation of being trapped in a bell jar.
Dunst, of course, starred in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, another film to tackle the subject of depression head-on. She’ll also be producing this one and will get the cameras rolling on it in the early part of 2017.