Reel Beach: Screens are heating up with passionate romances as spring gets nearer

By BERNIE FLETCHER

It’s been a long, cold winter, a time to curl up with a good book.

Spring is around the corner, though, and things are heating up with screen adaptations of passionate romance novels.

Wuthering Heights opened in theatres and Heated Rivalry has become a streaming phenomenon.

How do you feel when your favourite novel is brought to life?

Emily Bronte isn’t around to adapt her 1847 literary classic about romantic obsession, but Nova Scotia author Rachel Reid was a contributing producer on Heated Rivalry (Crave). She loves the show as a faithful adaptation of her bestselling books saying “just the whole thing was a dream”.

Vladimir sounds like a Russian novel, but it’s not. Julia May Jonas created and produced the new Netflix limited series from her 2022 debut novel. The author gives a sly nod to Vladimir Nabokov who wrote about forbidden love in his 1955 novel Lolita. Nabokov (1899-1977) taught at Harvard and collected rare butterflies.

Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz plays an English professor in mid-life crisis. Her ordered life begins to unravel after accusations against her husband (John Slattery), a fellow literature professor. The show explores themes of betrayal, desire, jealousy, secrets and lies. Whose story do we tell? Are we honest with ourselves and others?

“I love a Gothic romance. You know, the fixation, the pining.”

Weisz is the unnamed protagonist and unreliable narrator of her own story. “M” even talks directly to the camera in frequent asides.

She feels she has “lost the ability to captivate”. Once the queen of the faculty, she is losing her throne. She has writer’s block, her students consider her teachings “out of touch”, her daughter rebels against her controlling nature and her husband cheats on her.

A newly arrived, young professor and writer, Vladimir (Leo Woodall), becomes the object of her steamy fantasies. M wants to curl up by a fire with more than a good book. Is she falling in love…or lust? Things get complicated to say the least!

“All I want is a life free from complications.”

The setting is a small, upstate New York liberal arts college, but most of the filming was done at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, also seen in Total Recall (2012), Enemy (2013) and The Shape of Water (2017).

A number of scenes feature the Fred Urquhart Memorial Garden and the Valley Land Trail down to Highland Creek. The garden was dedicated in 2014 with a celebration of butterflies.

Dr. Urquhart (1911-2002) was a professor of zoology at U of T Scarborough. Along with his wife Norah, he dedicated his life’s work to understanding the migratory pattern of the monarch butterfly.

The award-winning IMAX film The Flight of the Butterflies tells the story of the long search to unlock the secrets of migration.
Fred Urquhart grew up close to the lake at the foot of Woodbine Avenue in the Beach and attended Kew Beach Public School. He became fascinated with nature while exploring the marshes that were once at Ashbridges Bay.

The Urquharts lived on Military Trail near the U of T Scarborough campus and released butterflies from Highland Creek.

“I’m coming to the cottage.”

–– illya in Heated Rivarly

Soon it will be cottage time. The Lake Muskoka cottage in Heated Rivalry is available for rent.

In Vladimir, it’s a Russian-American (Woodall) coming to an idyllic, log cabin in Halton Hills after M takes him out for lunch.

Catch the series on Netflix for Weisz’s star performance or go for a nature hike along Highland Creek in Scarborough and look for butterflies. The spirit of Fred and Norah Urquhart will be watching over you.