Nana

This is definitely a fun film to look at: fantastic colour, sets and costumes, and the powdery, lipsticky glamour of 35-year-old Martine Carol, a blonde like Zola's Nana, but now sporting the red hair. She is, of course, too old for the role - in the novel Nana, like the Second Empire, is a filthy pubescent trollop, decadent and parasitic fly. To mis(quote) Hugo: in short, 15 years!

Eventually she dies in smallpox, her moral rot now the physical one, too.

Zola? Maybe not.