{"id":3099,"date":"2020-11-28T21:24:34","date_gmt":"2020-11-28T21:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=3099"},"modified":"2020-11-28T21:24:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-28T21:24:34","slug":"review-love-and-friendship-2016-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2020\/11\/28\/review-love-and-friendship-2016-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Love And Friendship (2016 movie)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This is based on Jane Austen\u2019s early work, Lady Susan, which I\u2019ve never read, so I\u2019ve no idea how faithful it is to the original. Reviews have been mixed, to say the least, and although I\u2019ve watched it twice now, I\u2019m still not quite sure what to make of it. It\u2019s rather enamoured of its own cleverness (each of the characters is introduced with a witty little description, but there are far too many of them for this to be helpful for anyone who\u2019s not read the book), but it\u2019s utterly beautiful to look at, so when the whole thing gets overwhelming, the confused viewer can simply sit back and enjoy the spectacle.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the plot: impoverished widow Lady Susan Vernon is living a hand-to-mouth existence bouncing around the homes of various relatives, while trying to marry off her daughter, Frederica. When she is turfed out of one home because of a fling with her hostess\u2019s husband (very bad manners!), she lands up at Churchill, the home of her husband\u2019s brother. Here she meets her husband\u2019s brother\u2019s wife\u2019s brother (are you keeping up?), Reginald deCourcy, and sets out ostensibly to attach him to her daughter, but actually succeeding in making him fall for her. Meanwhile, her daughter\u2019s bonkers suitor, Sir James Martin, arrives in hot pursuit. Oh yes, and there\u2019s an American friend of Lady Susan\u2019s, whose sole purpose seems to be to be the recipient of Lady Susan\u2019s innermost thoughts. Presumably the original was epistolatory, but she feels a bit superfluous here.<\/p>\n

Let me say right away that Kate Beckinsale is utterly brilliant as Lady Susan. It helps that she has all Jane Austen\u2019s wit to work with, and in some respects she reminds me of Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park, incredibly clever and witty, but also cynical and horribly self-centred. But charming. Oh so very charming. Reginald is captivated, and who can blame him, but his sister sees right through Lady Susan and tries desperately to steer him away. It takes a major catastrophe to open his eyes to the truth.<\/p>\n

Of the rest of the cast, no one particularly stands out, but they were uniformly excellent, so no complaints there. I wondered a little at the American friend\u2019s accent, which veered into Irish to my ears occasionally and sometimes was downright incomprehensible, but it didn\u2019t much matter (see remarks above about enjoying the spectacle). The daughter was amusingly prone to running away, the bonkers suitor was over-the-top silly and the slighted wife was even more over-the-top hysterical, but they were an interesting counterpoint to Lady Susan\u2019s calmly outrageous manoeuvrings, which she made to seem oh so rational and even sensible. Because this is an early work by Austen, the characters are perhaps not as smooth as in her later works, but the neat plotting and her trademark wit are on full display.<\/p>\n

The setting is pre-Regency, somewhere in the 1790s, so the women wear beautifully draped fuller skirts and lacy shawls, and spectacular big hats. I was less enamoured with the hairdos, since all the women wore identical styles, married or single, outgoing or demure. The men look very Mr Darcy, which is perfectly acceptable, and the houses are Georgian era, which means classically elegant.<\/p>\n

On the whole, I enjoyed this very much, and will certainly watch it again. After another three or four times I might even fully understand what it\u2019s all about. But hey, the spectacle!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is based on Jane Austen\u2019s early work, Lady Susan, which I\u2019ve never read, so I\u2019ve no idea how faithful it is to the original. Reviews have been mixed, to say the least, and although I\u2019ve watched it twice now, I\u2019m still not quite sure what to make of it. It\u2019s rather enamoured of its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3103,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3099\/revisions\/3103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}