New Bedford, Massachusetts, an old fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin-dealing represent just a few of the many threads in the community's diverse fabric.
Good cover too, reminds me of True Detective, which I haven't watched yet (but want to), but the poster is similar.
Whilst there was much to love about this movie - the scenery; set design; costumes; humour- I couldn't get past my dislike of Lady Susan herself. Her machinations and manipulations just irritated me and ruined what was otherwise very enjoyable. Nevertheless, you can enjoy some of the comedic and costumic (not a word, I know, but it works for me) delights from its trailer.
I have enjoyed putting together this post and it makes me want to watch it again and maybe reconsider my opinion.
Some commentary from articles because I am too lazy to form my thoughts into prescient prose:
Jane Austen’s Lady Susan (written around 1794, when she was eighteen) is an epistolary novel, and a balletic farce of sex and money. Its plot centers on the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, “the most accomplished Coquette in England,” and her attempts to marry her daughter Frederica to Sir James Martin, a wealthy if charmless aristocrat, while she conducts affairs with two younger men: Lord Manwaring, and Reginald De Courcy.
It’s a quieter, English-country-house-version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses—where a ruthless woman is humiliated.
This adaptation is really a rewrite. And maybe that’s a particularly attractive mode, when the novel to be adapted is in epistolary form. The game of the epistolary novel is to maintain a constant haze between foreground and background, between what is reported to a correspondent and what the reader must infer has happened: it is the art form of gossip, of the hint.
Stillman’s characters are monsters of literary conversation. In Austen’s Lady Susan, her heroine makes a major observation to her friend Mrs. Johnson. It’s meant as evidence of immorality, but in Stillman’s film it is a charming statement of fact. “If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence. Consideration and Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty. And here I have opportunity enough for the exercise of my Talent, as the chief of my time is spent in Conversation.” For in this new world invented by Stillman, people talk syntactically, at high speed, with absolute artistry (one comparison, in a different register, but at a similar pitch of artificiality, is Tarantino). Stillman uses dialogue the way Matisse uses color: it does not necessarily correspond to anything in the real world.
At such moments, trying to examine Love & Friendship, our definitions like adaptationor rewrite become faintly anachronistic, or clumsy. It’s a novel transformed into cinema, but it’s also a film that has allowed itself to be contaminated by literature. And that is the rarer, and greater, achievement.
Very interesting commentary on the film and adaption in this video.
Interesting what Jemma Redgrave says at about 25 seconds - no, it doesn't feel like an Austen. Maybe because of the different format and how it was a novella written early on when she was around 18 - maybe it was unfinished for a reason.
And some pictures to delight:
A great collection of the "opening and end title design, plus character intros and a variety of intertitles" from the film - here. Definitely worth looking at.
This book reached out and took me by the hand, and was the highlight of my final year of high school. For a time there, I practically had this book memorised I read it so much.
The perfection of this play will never fade for me, and I don't want it to.
So, luckily, the movie was a perfect rendition of the play. And the trailer below does a great job of mashing the movie together.
Furthermore,
I knew I could count on Alain De Botton's video to use the correct pronunciation of Nietzsche's video. I just didn't think it'd be as explicit! I think Dakin would have appreciated the breakdown too.
Dakin: ”I’ve been reading this book by Kneeshaw.”
”Kneeshaw... Frederick Kneeshaw.”
Scripps: ”I think that’s pronounced Nietzsche."
Dakin, referring to Hector: “He let me call him Kneeshaw.”
And the oft quoted gobbet from the play, if only people read/ watched it as much as they quoted it.
Having now read (and loved) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë I understand that the 2011 film, which irritated me (although I loved the imagery!), really was an "interpretation" like so many films based on classics seem to be. So much was cut out, and parts were embellished. I also find that portrayals of Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester are often more tortured and gothic than they come across in the book. Rochester really isn't that broody. Although, my main gripe is that Rochester isn't supposed to be handsome - yet he is unceasingly presented as such. I guess they can't make someone attractive based on what they say and do instead of reliance on the physical. Which rather contradicts the whole point of the story - Jane, Rochester, and St John's characters altered, to my mind quite a bit. Ramblings of a mad woman I guess my notes to be - but not Bertha mad....
“You examine me, Miss Eyre,” said he: “do you think me handsome?” I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I was aware — “No, sir.”
From where do all these handsome Rochesters originate...?
"What fault do you find with me? I have all my limbs and features." - I will give the screenwriters props for that little in-joke though... Not for long...
Anyhoo, that's all for now from me.
But the topic will arise again, because Jane Eyre:
It's only hoarding if it's weird stuff, like toothpaste caps and empty chip packets.
Inside Carolina Irving’s prewar Manhattan apartment, the library and living room features a blue and white dhurrie from Jaipur, a Robert Kime pouf, and a first-century A.D. Celtic stone head. Photographed by François Halard, Vogue, October 2006
I always marvel at the bias of society... we encourage alcohol over books - what madness! A book is even more intoxicating, and more likely to result in good favour.
I especially like: "I'll be leaving this sign up until it becomes a social norm."
Looking for new reads, I fell down some rabbit holes on Goodreads, including into this very specific and niche list... Massachusetts Murders !
