Jane Austen’s film adaptations are evergreen.
The cocktail of relationships, social class and bad sentimental decisions at the base of the novel of manners is a narrative recipe that works with every generation. This is where, after Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley also gives gen-z a new adaptation of the first novel by the English writer. Reason and feeling is in Italian rooms
Ragione e sentimento: amori di famiglia
The sudden death of Mr. Dashwood forces the widow and the three daughters to leave their ancestral home for a cheaper cottage in Devonshire, catapulting them into a social milieu completely different from all they know. To complicate the matter there is also the fact that for the two older sisters this change coincides with the entrance into the field of the marriage market. The rational and measured Elinor fell in love with Mr. Ferrars, whose rhetoric could be shyness or something; the impetuous Marianne instead loses her head for the dull Willoughby. Among the dances of London and the beaches of Devonshire, the sisters will have to challenge the pitfalls of high society and their fatal flaws.
Scelte sagge…
Reason and feeling is a very nice movie. Oakley does not feel the need to drag Austen into the 21st century and seems to trust enough of the original material to understand that dated does not mean broken. The economic system that regulates the life of the Dashwoods, the absurdity of a society in which marriage is together feeling and transaction and the different way in which Elinor and Marianne face their feelings are legible and narratively valid elements today as then.
And the film tells them well. The social watchmaking of England’s Regency is portrayed in a vivid and clear way and is a background to a bond between tender and faceted sisters — although Daisy Edgar-Jones convinces more than Creed-Miles. As a novel of manners, I mean, the film is perfectly capable.
…ma un po’ pavide
All right, therefore — and it is: performance, history and packaging are perfectly pleasant.
But there’s something missing, some je-ne-sais-quoi. Not because an adaptation of Austen must necessarily be modernized or deconstructed. But, as Elinor learns, too much grace can end up choking.
A completely smooth object cannot, by definition, be incisive.
Joe Wright’s Horgoglio and Prejudice come back to mind: it is also pleasant and sincere adaptation, but also a film deeply connoted by the conceptual and formal tics of his time.
And among them, perhaps, with some extra edge to which the viewer could cling.
Il cast
Daisy Edgar-Jones is Elinor, greater than the Dashwood sisters, of soft temperament and accustomed to hiding emotions. Esmé Creed-Miles is Marianne, romantic and impulsive. They complete the Bodhi Rae Breathnach family as the younger sister Margaret and Caitríona Balfe as Mrs. Dashwood. George McKay and Frank Dillane are respectively Mr Ferrars and the passionate Willoughby, while Herbert Nordrum dresses up as Colonel Brandon, an ex-military with labyrinth emotions. They complete the cast Fiona Shaw in the role of the chatter Mrs Jennings and Stacy Martin in that of Fanny, half-sister acquired by the poisoned tooth.
L’articolo Reason and feeling is a film too much garbato – The review comes from Dituttounpop.it.
