April 18, 2023, 11:16am
Fans of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All The Light We Cannot See have something to chew on today, with the release of the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Deadpool and Stranger Things(?!) producer Shawn Levy. Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, adapted the book for television.
The story follows Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl blinded by cataracts at age 6, whose locksmith father taught her in childhood to understand the world through touch and memory, as she attempts to contact her father and uncle via a radio across enemy lines from a village in France, after the outbreak of World War II. Living alone in German-occupied Saint-Malo as a young woman, Marie-Laure comes into contact over the radio with Werner Pfennig, a German soldier and savant of sorts.
Levy told Vanity Fair that he went to great lengths to cast an actor in the role of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, finding Aria Mia Loberti in the haypile of audition tapes. Loberti is legally blind, and pursuing a doctorate in ancient rhetoric at Penn State. (Nell Sutton plays Marie-Laure in flashbacks.) Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Louis Hofmann are also cast.
The trailer relies heavily on 3/4 speed film, Nazi flags, and Debussy, and gives us a taste of Mark Ruffalo as a papa. A chief question for those who will bite might be how a text so apt at allowing a visually impaired character to express her delight at things like the smell of ink on pamphlets raining from the sky can translate to the silver screen. Doubtless, they will find a way.
Here’s the trailer, to tide you over until November 2.