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Mia Goth\u2019s eyes look naked. In every image, no matter how many times this face is reproduced, the vulnerability startles. Doe-eyed, doll-eyed, fair brows, hardly any visible lashes, she is sweetness in a rancid world and, in Autumn de Wilde\u2019s 2020 adaptation of Emma<\/em>, my favorite Harriet. She may deviate from some of the specifics of the Harriet that Jane Austen writes in Emma<\/em>. Her eyes are brown, whereas Harriet\u2019s are blue. Goth is not plump, but she is soft. It\u2019s through Harriet that Austen writes the soulfulness that undercuts her story\u2019s satire. This is what Goth delivers\u2014Harriet\u2019s \u201cflutter of spirits.\u201d<\/p>\n Being a Regency-era gentleman\u2019s \u201cnatural child,\u201d Harriet never had the privilege of innocence. Not knowing whose daughter she is, she has had to be okay with the unknown\u2014a foil to Emma\u2019s need to be in control. Goth shares a likeness with Brittany Murphy, whose Tai is Harriet\u2019s proxy in Clueless<\/em>. Both actresses are bubbly, blissful, but present to the universe\u2019s darkness\u2014it\u2019s not the same as being naive, even if the qualities are sometimes confused. While there\u2019s no bloodshed in de Wilde\u2019s costume drama, Goth brings something from her scream queen r\u00e9sum\u00e9: her ability to edge between purity and madness. She plays Harriet with an openness to the intensity of desire and an appreciation of its absurdity<\/p>\n There\u2019s a tabloid soap opera that Goth\u2019s casting conjures, her real-life entanglements mirroring an Austenian plot tailor-made for TMZ. In 2018, seventeen months before the Emma<\/em> remake\u2019s release, when Goth was promoting a film with Robert Pattinson, their respective exes Shia LaBeouf and FKA twigs were in the news for being photographed together. \u201cAwkward,\u201d reported People<\/em>. LaBeouf and FKA twigs eventually broke up (there\u2019s an ongoing lawsuit about his alleged abuse of her), and LaBeouf and Goth got back together. Today, they\u2019re married. Like Harriet, maybe Goth could have played her hand differently and landed a better match. Harriet wedded a farmer, Goth a canceled movie star. On both fronts, you could say, in the end love won\u2014but at what cost? Austen is a cynic, after all.<\/p>\n \u2014Whitney Mallett<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We will never be free from Pride and Prejudice<\/em>. Its tale of class-traversing romance has remained so ardently with us that Darcy and Elizabeth\u2019s love has become the blueprint of a type of romantic narrative itself. For over two centuries, every weird, pretty brunette in art and literature (her beauty always orthogonal to her braininess) who has received great romantic providence has been a daughter of Lizzie Bennet. We would have no horny One Direction fan fiction without Pride and Prejudice<\/em>; there would be no Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>, most definitely no Twilight<\/em>; it\u2019s likely that brunettes would possess none of the cultural purchase we enjoy now had Jane Austen never given it to us.<\/p>\n We certainly wouldn\u2019t have Bride and Prejudice<\/em>, Gurinder Chadha\u2019s 2004 Bollywood adaptation of the 1813 novel and perhaps my favorite thing to come out of Austen\u2019s infinitely elastic multiverse. Much of its success is owed to Aishwarya Rai, whose perspicacious Lalita Bakshi (the movie\u2019s Lizzie Bennet) is perhaps a woman of greater beauty than Austen intended. In the book, Lizzie is a little plain; her \u201cfine eyes,\u201d as Darcy puts it, are her primary attraction. Casting Miss World 1994 as the second-prettiest sister would make the metaphysics of their romance totally unrecognizable were it not for the racial difference that Chadha\u2019s adaptation introduces into it. It doesn\u2019t matter that Rai is Bollywood\u2019s Bellucci with limpid green eyes, nor that her brown hair is dyed a curious auburnish shade in the movie\u2014she\u2019s not white, and Darcy is, so her generational beauty is still relegated to the status of subaltern brunette.<\/p>\n Casting Rai is just one way Bride and Prejudice <\/em>manages to adapt Austen\u2019s political inquiries around pride and prejudice into an Indian context and market it back to an Anglophone audience as a Bollywood musical, a form that is, in many ways, the dialectical opposite of Austen\u2019s nineteenth-century British novel. Chadha\u2019s film explodes the plot of Pride and Prejudice<\/em>\u2019s into a jubilant smorgasbord of song and dance, and expounds upon its core concept\u2014the uneasy path romantic love charts through social structures\u2014by portraying a romance that surmounts not only class difference, but also modern iterations of colonialism. When Darcy shares his plans to purchase a hotel in Goa, Lalita bristles, shouting, \u201cI thought we\u2019d gotten rid of imperialists like you!\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not British\u2014I\u2019m American,\u201d responds Darcy, the ignoramus. \u201cExactly!\u201d Lali responds. Chadha\u2019s ushering Austen into 2004 also produces other succulent details\u2014grainy photos of McMansions peered at on flip-phone screens, a Burberry bikini with matching visor, rimless glasses. Astute brunettes rejoice: As Bride and Prejudice<\/em> demonstrates, the Austenian blueprint is versatile enough to celebrate Lizzie Bennets across all epochs of history, in either of the earth\u2019s hemispheres. Her ingenious formula is one that is\u2014forgive me\u2014tried and dexterous.<\/p>\n \u2014Arielle Isack<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There have been, by my count, nine screen adaptations of Jane Austen\u2019s Persuasion<\/em>, the author\u2019s final and posthumously published 1817 novel. The most recent and maybe worst attempt to retell the story of Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth\u2014two old people in their late twenties who are brought back together seven years following the dissolution of their engagement\u2014is Netflix\u2019s 2022 production starring Dakota Johnson, whose serviceable performance does not spare this film from the vulgar polyester taint of our Temu sensibilities. I notice that whenever people decide that they want to update something from the past so that it appeals to the contemporary eye, they talk about the \u201ctimeless\u201d qualities of the source material. But this particular production seems to roil with the time traveler\u2019s horror. There is something incredibly 2022 <\/em>about director Carrie Cracknell\u2019s take on Austen\u2019s Regency era story of regret, restraint, and eventual reunion, relying as it does on a number of conventions more redolent of TikTok than literary canon. Would Anne Elliot eavesdrop on her would-be lover while peeing against a tree? Would she swill red wine or directly address her audience or throw her dignity to the wind with soliloquies about how much it sucks when the boy you like won\u2019t sit next to you at a dance? Maybe, but not in public! Straddling the distance between an episode of Lizzie McGuire and an expensively produced luxury fragrance ad, this film is the Pet Sematary<\/em> of Austen-inspired cinema. By Anne\u2019s seventeenth\u00a0fourth-wall shattering complaint, I thought Stephen King\u2019s words had a lot of wisdom about what it means to believe things from the past are suited to the present; sometimes, this film seems to prove, dead is indeed better.<\/p>\n \u2014Alissa Bennett<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Austen adaptations unspared from the vulgar polyester taint of our Temu sensibilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[67827,68831,300,81,883],"class_list":["post-171041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-featured","tag-film-adaptations","tag-jane-austen","tag-movies","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n