The odds of a play published in 1900 still managing to be controversial 110 years are slim, but if anyone's going to make it happen, it may well be City of God director Fernando Meirelles. Deadline Hollywood reports that he'll be directing 360, Peter Morgan's adaptation of the play Reigen, written by Arthur Schnitzler at the turn of the last century.
It's unclear exactly what Morgan's take on the material will be, particularly since it's been adapted many times over the year. Schnitzler's original play consisted of 10 scenes, each taking place between two people immediately before or immediately after they had sex. It was a commentary on sex and class and the role they played in the Austrian society of the time, and was so inflammatory it wasn't performed publicly until 20 years later. Reigen has been adapted several times in theater and on film three times under the French title, La Ronde, and most recently comic director Ken Kwapis adapted it as the feature Sexual Life, which aired on Showtime.
You could argue that Reigen is the grandfather of those hyperlink stories like Babel and Crash, and while Meirelles has never worked in that mini-genre specifically, he's a good fit for it. His last film Blindness, which was almost universally hated but I kind of liked, dealt with a large cast of characters who, like the original characters of Reigen, did not have names. Morgan's take on the story will determine a lot of what to expect here, but I'd be cautiously excited about a project that at least sounds smarter than everything else we're seeing in theaters right now.
