The desire to bring Jane Austen closer to the present is eminently understandable, if only because period dramas are too often made with such a callous deadness that they seem to forget that for their protagonists, this was in fact the present, just as much. fueled by sex and 'new' technology and fashion as our society is today. Austen's heroines, too, are often in and of themselves ahead of their own patriarchal time, nurturing a sort of proto-feminist point of view and acting accordingly. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if a historical subject is to be radically reimagined with a contemporary edge, it must be transformed, or with such grace - like Greta Gerwig's sublime petite women, who drew almost all of his additional material from additional texts by Louisa May Alcott - or with such astonishing eccentricity - such as that of Yorgos Lanthimos the favorite, whose modernity had almost nothing to do with his dialogue and almost everything to do with his sour, frankly sexual and surreal tone - that the result becomes less adaptation than homage.
Persuasion isn't quite incendiary, as the set design and overall visual style are true to the letter, at least by the standards of the typical Austen adaptation. The screenplay's ill-advised tendency to refer to its longing leads as "exes" will no doubt startle fans of the original lyric and cause it to fall between two (beautifully upholstered) chairs. Modernized dialogue only appears in places - not consistently, but patchy, as if the film is trying to decide if it's really serious about the whole endeavor. "If you're a five in London," one character offers, "you're a 10 in Bath." “A playlist he made for me,” Anne nods to the camera, proudly showing off a handful of sheet music donated to her lover in happier times. Gender differences jokes and moaning innuendo are meant to feel naughty and startling by their presence in an adaptation of an 1800s novel, but not so much recall familiar jokes from '90s sitcoms: Women Should Act stupid to land a man, men tend not to listen to their wives, Anne is not “interested in receiving instructions on where to [her] bushel,' and so on, all added up to suggest that we might be looking at a 200-year-old episode of King of Queens.
Dakota Johnson's casting as Anne Elliot is simultaneously one of the film's most interesting choices and one of its biggest stumbling blocks. "Your family can only be escaped by two things", Anne states dryly early in the film: "Marriage and death." In Johnson's mouth, the joke takes on an ironic air, as neither death nor marriage would deny the fact that she is a third-generation movie king: because a movie buff can look at her and immediately see 60 years of Hollywood history. , it's hard to see her as Anne, ordinary Anne, a lonely spinster. The self-assurance in her demeanor and the playful, wickedly dismissive demeanor she brings in her best roles contribute to a very special charisma, no doubt shaped by the knowledge that while many other actresses have to adjust to being famous after living their lives As a commoner, she was born in the orbit as if "A-lister" was a hereditary title.
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