The 2007 Tv Film: “Some Much Needed Sizzle”

CHAPTER TWELVE THE 2007 TV FILM: “SOME MUCH NEEDED SIZZLE” The 2005 Pride and Prejudice seems to have set off a new wave of Austen films, in television as well as cinema. In the spring of 2007, ITV launched a “Jane Austen Season” airing three new films based on Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, combined with a rerun of the 1996 Emma. Other signs of a new surge of Austen interest were seen in films based on Austen’s life or authorship: Becoming Jane (2007),1 The Jane Austen Book Club (2007),2 Miss Austen Regrets (2008),3 Lost in Austen (2008),4 and later Austenland (2013).5 Evidently, Jane Austen’s name is of market value in the early twenty- first century.6 The BBC followed up with new miniseries of Sense and Sensibility (2008) and Emma (2009), Bollywood produced a version of Emma in Aisha (2010), and American film-makers of varying calibre have contributed modernized versions of novels.7 1 A biopic about Austen’s young years based on Jon Spence’s 2003 biography of the same title. Although Spence is much more preoccupied with historical documentation, both book and film insist on reading Austen’s life as a tragedy of lost love, based on very thin evidence. 2 An adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel of the same title (2004), it is the story of contemporary American readers finding parallels between their own lives and those of Austen’s characters. 3 A BBC film set in Austen’s late, productive years and focusing on her drive for writing, her sharp intellect and her anti-sentimental tone. 4 A television miniseries about a modern Londoner who finds herself transported back to the action and characters of Pride and Prejudice. 5 A modern New Yorker takes part in a Regency re-enactment at an Austen theme park. Like the previous example, it is a testimony to the force of the post-1995 Austen/Darcy obsession. 6 As The Guardian’s correspondent Owen Gibson phrased it in a preview of the television films: “ITV calls in Jane Austen to halt slide in ratings” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/11/media.ITV, 11 November 2005 [accessed 25 July 2013]). 7 To wit: Scents and Sensibility and a modern Latino version of the same novel in From Prada to Nada (both 2011), and A Modern Pride and Prejudice (2012). The formally most innovative is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, published on YouTube as 100 348 Irony and Idyll The new Mansfield Park was directed by Ian B. MacDonald and written by Maggie Wadey. It comes across as a sentimental story set at the turn of the eighteenth century, influenced in its reading of Austen by the popular tendency to romanticize her novels,8 and in its film context largely by the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and to a lesser extent the 1999 Mansfield Park. The film starts as a sentimental story, and also ends as one. The first scene is literally lachrymose, as the child Fanny’s face is seen in close-up, covered in tears, as she is travelling to Mansfield. The last scene is a bridal waltz where bride and groom ensure each other of their eternal happiness. In between, we are given a story that is reduced in its setting, characters, plot and themes, while retaining some main characters and events from the novel. Reductions will be necessary in a 93 minute format, and it is not this in itself, but rather what kind of reductions are made, that is of interest. Here, they are all done with the result of making the story an unequivocal romance. The film-makers emulate the 2005 Pride and Prejudice in setting the film in the transition between rococo and Regency styles, which should signify the late 1790s. They show us a glimpse of the cover of Lover’s Vows, with the year 1798 printed on it, which then must be about the time of the setting. Some rooms of the house are clearly baroque/rococo interiors, others clearly Regency.9 The Bertram family show that they are out of touch with city fashions by wearing rococo dresses. “Last year’s style of course”, Mary remarks about the Bertram sisters, herself being, as yet, the only one wearing an empire- line gown. Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris wear brocade silk gowns with fitted waists and trains and large, elegant hats, but not wigs. The younger women wear much simpler cotton dresses, but have not discovered the high waistline yet. The film is thus set a decade and more before the events of the novel, although there is no explanation or obvious reason for this change of setting, which there was in the 1999 adaptation. It was presumably done to achieve some of the same atmosphere that infused postings between April 2012 and March 2013, in which Lizzie makes a video blog from her room, involving her two sisters Jane and Lydia and her friend Charlotte: http://www.lizziebennet.com/ (accessed 30 August 2013). 8 A tendency seen, for instance, in numerous editions of her novels worldwide with cover illustrations and blurbs aimed at the romance market. 9 Filmed at Newby Hall in Yorkshire. .

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