THE ART OF PERSUASION

Persuading you into Persuasion

Netflix’s film of Persuasion has been roundly criticised from all quarters. Emma Clegg enjoys the crits as much as the film itself and urges you to use one hour and 49 minutes of your life to see if you agree

Netflix’s new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, released last month, has not had the admiring reviews it must have sought. “Everyone involved should be in prison,” declares Deborah Ross of The Spectator; “It feels like the movie thinks you’re too stupid to understand Jane Austen on your own”, says Constance Grady of Vox.com; and Stuart Heritage of The Guardian comments, “there’s something so aggressively obnoxious about the way that Persuasion cribs from Fleabag that it feels like the death of something.”

Reading reviews like this (as we did with relish, following anything Austen related with fanatical absorption) only serves to make you

Cosmo Jarvis as Captain Frederick Wentworth

Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, Richard E. Grant as Sir Walter Elliot, and Yolanda Kettle as Elizabeth Elliot

All photographs Nick Wall/Netflix © 2022

This filmic experience takes you away from reality as you follow a hazy, atmospheric journey to marital bliss

want to watch it even more, and these reviews must in truth have upped the viewing figures significantly.

The story of Persuasion tells of an unconforming woman with modern sensibilities, Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson), who lives with her snobby and self-absorbed family on the brink of bankruptcy. When Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis) – The Dashing One she once sent away – crashes back into her life eight years later, Anne must choose between putting the past behind her or listening to her heart when it comes to second chances.

British theatre director Carrie Cracknell makes her feature directorial debut with what Netflix describes as “a modern, subversive take on Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a story of second chances and the pressures women faced in Regency-era England.”

Cracknell explains: “We wanted to adapt this story with a version of Anne who’s incredibly contemporary, strident, and funny. Someone who messes up, gets herself into awkward situations, and gets things wrong. We wanted to take the spirit of the original character and drag her into the current day. We wanted to honour the tropes and traditions of Jane Austen while making the characters more diverse, current, and emotionally available, where people could really see themselves in the characters.” Executive Producer Elizabeth Cantillon says, “It’s the perfect combination of sincere emotion with a vein of sneaky, subversive humour.”

The reviews challenge with outrage the results of this approach. It’s certainly true that the Fleabag influence is strident; it’s valid to question why use an Austen story when it’s stripped so bare it becomes a timeless romance; and I can understand why history buffs and J.A. devotees feel outraged at such a flattened version of this sacred Regency story. Regency conventions are either unfollowed or loosened, fashions are relaxed, uniforms unworn, hair is minimally styled, often windswept and waistlines are lowered from the normal Empire lines of the period. What you have is a gentle, timeless story about love, how we make our choices, and how those are influenced by society and those around us, with the direct voice of the character in your ear, set within some sumptuously attractive landscapes and interiors, from urban chic to distressed country.

And yet I found the film highly amusing and rather raw and beautiful in its scenography and soft, anti-bright green/blue/teal choice of colours. I’d say it’s like a gentle visual and conversational poem of a woman’s experience of love. It blows away the detail and leaves you with a distilled, soft-at-the-edges, evasive essence. I was carried along by it, helped considerably by the humour.

Each role is a mere cameo. Richard E. Grant as Anne’s self-important, narcissistic, spendthrift father Sir Walter Elliot is a case in point, and yet

he was uproarious as he rails against the reality of his diminishing pecuniary situation and parades around his pillared corridors, the walls of which are plastered with portraits of himself. Anne’s sisters Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and Elizabeth (Yolanda Kettle) are also extreme comic caracatures in their self-absorption and one-dimensionality, but it’s all a riot and serves to focus on Anne who is more liberal and sophisticated (of course, she is the heroine), although a way sparkier and more wine-loving version of Jane Austen’s subdued heroine.

Indeed the downing of wine from the bottle at Anne’s lowest points did feel a step too far. Constance Grady judges this harshly as “the mannerisms of the heroine of a mid-tier ’90s rom-com, weeping in the bathtub, weeping into copious amounts of red wine, weeping as she pratfalls into accidentally pouring gravy over her head.” Wentworth fares no better: “As played by Cosmo Jarvis, Wentworth is shy, brooding, and vague; a Darcy cyborg without the specificity. He gives good gaze, but no evidence of anything behind it.” He does indeed give good gaze and I love him for it.

Netflix makes no bones about the influence of Fleabag and Enola Holmes, but the critics are dismissive of this jumping-on-thebandwagon subversion and find the ‘breaking the fourth wall’ style with Anne’s wry, intimate asides to camera overly dominating. I don’t feel offended by this because it shakes things up and breaks down the stalwart conventions of historic adaptations.

You’ll like the film, as long as you aren’t pedantic about historical accuracy or the novels of Jane Austen; don’t need a layered, intellectual plot to sit through a one hour and 49 minutes film; and are happy to see Anne and Wentworth lying in long grass at the edge of a cliff in close embrace having achieved their romantic dreams, none the wiser about the reasons one suits the other.

I must say that Bath fares well. First of all it’s easy to identify the Bath bit because there is an extended period in ‘BATH’, identified in super large white capitals across the screen. We recognise The Royal Crescent, The Guildhall, the colonnades on Bath Street where Primark’s windows were reinvented as a haberdasher and milliners, Gravel Walk, and in front of the Stall Street side of the Roman Baths, which was styled as an inn (I ask you).

The mistake that’s been made in this film’s critical evaluation is overthinking all the things it’s not doing or has rejected, and not focusing on the things it gets right. Those include a hugely entertaining collection of parody characters; a work that knocks back details beyond all expectations, creating a new otherworldly art form; a magnificent colour palette; resonant cinematography across interiors and landscape (credit to cinematographer Joe Anderson); the shrinking of an Austen story that takes away many of the more irritating period frenzies of her books; and a filmic experience that removes you from reality as you follow a hazy, atmospheric journey to marital bliss. What’s wrong with that?

OK, the characters are cardboard-cut-out simple, like personalities in a children’s story with Anne as the narrator, but this results in a bravely pared, amusing, uncomplicated romantic film about a love that’s both unreal and as relevant today as it was in the Regency period.

The review headline quotes do need to roll at the end of the film, because just as the reviews don’t work without the film, the drama itself cranks up several notches after devouring them. “It may be the longest one hour and 49 minutes of your life”, warns Deborah Ross. But how will you know unless you try? n

Lydia Rose Bewley as Penelope Clay, Richard E. Grant as Sir Walter Elliot, Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot, Yolanda Kettle as Elizabeth Elliot Nikki Amuka-Bird as Lady Russell and Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot –filmed in Bath Street