A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, August 19, 2022

Persuasion (Carrie Cracknell, 2022)











Cast: Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Richard E. Grant, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Henry Golding, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Nia Towle, Yolanda Kettle, Lydia Rose Bewley, Edward Bluemel, Afolabi Alli. Screenplay: Ron Bass, Alice Victoria Winslow, based on a novel by Jane Austen. Cinematography: Joe Anderson. Production design: John Paul Kelly. Film editing: Pani Scott. Music: Stuart Earl.

Persuasion is not as bad as I’d heard. I knew it had been described as a kind of mashup of Bridgerton (non-traditional casting) and Fleabag (breaking the fourth wall), and that Austenites were appalled. There are two ways to adapt a classic novel to film: follow it as faithfully as you can, reproducing the substance of the story and the milieu in which it takes place, or use the story as a springboard for a modern adaptation – e.g. the translation of Emma into Clueless or of Pride and Prejudice into Fire Island. Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion falls somewhere in between, taking the bones of the Austen novel and its Regency setting, and viewing them through a contemporary sensibility. It doesn’t work here, but it might have. Armando Iannucci came closer with his Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), which also used non-traditional casting (including Persuasion’s Nikki Amuka-Bird) and has a 21st-century sensibility clearly operating throughout. Iannucci may have succeeded in part because he didn’t go as far as Persuasion’s screenwriters in mixing today’s casual speech with the author’s period dialogue. Jane Austen’s contemporaries would never have referred to former lovers as “exes,” for example. Persuasion is a misfire, but it’s often fun to watch. 

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