Jane Austen described her work as being small and intricately framed and compared it to a small brush applied to a little bit (not two inch...
Jane Austen described her work as being small and intricately framed and compared it to a small brush applied to a little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory.
The less, the better--would they not say? Born on December 16, 1775, Austen is considered to be one of the greatest novelists in English language, who has written around half a dozen of masterpieces including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park.
Her novels are timeless and in most aspects unprecedented. They are composed in a new fresh and economical language which was influenced by her caustic humour and her critical moral as well as psychological feeling. However, any one book is different enough in tone that readers have enjoyed guessing over the years just which Jane Austen book they are.
The same can be asked when it comes to Austen film and television adaptations. Her work has most often been adapted more than thirty times, starting with a rather stiffly costumed Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice (1940). The humour, period detail and exquisitely put-together romance-driven narratives have seemed to suit our contemporary rom-com all right, being centrally marinated in Merchant-Ivory good taste. But in her larger issues - the social, the financial, the moral, the rights of women, family, and of heart and head education - we can pick out the same movements in the current of whatever decent argumentation any of the adaptations has on the lines of the book.
And that can be quite remote. Sense and Sensibility has been adapted eight times and one of them was the Indian musical, Kandukondain Kandukondain and the play on words, Scents and Sensibility (2011). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a YouTube show, which brings a little twist to Pride and Prejudice by making it modern day. And then there is Clueless that has become a modern Hollywood classic that will celebrate its 30 years in a few days (July 19). The film Lueless is an adaptation of Emma but it does not acknowledge that fact in the credits.
Whether her novels should have been filmed at all is an open question, grave Austen lovers are sure to answer, but was the adaptation of Austen possible on the big or little screen, serious Austen people will past say No. It was a desolate picture, and the best she could make of it was to lay a mist over it, and trust to find an improvement in the clearing. Nonetheless, Austen herself said that the most important thing to her as an author was to be capable of laughing at the society, at herself, and at other people. Unless, she added, I should be hanged ere I had read the first chapter.
Here, Reader, is a discussion of Austen movies and short TV series with my most favourite to my least favourite but in such case, it is surprising as to how well Austen's works were carried out but with a lot of care and respect, most of these can be deemed rewarding. All of them can be streamed.
1. Clueless (1995). You can say that this is the most non-faithful film of Austen. Heckerling moves setting and characters to contemporary Beverly Hills and mutates Austen Emma bright but curiously obtuse to Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), a bright yet curiously obtuse high school girl who can tell of a cute boy, in the lingua franca of 1995, that he was kind of a Baldwin.
Although re-inventing Cher as the queen bee of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic society, where she falls in love with Christian (Justin Walker) a gay boy who loves shopping, Clueless never forgets to satirically celebrate its heroine and her foibles with the sunny humour that Austen infused her novel with. And Heckerling, who possibly admires Silverstone in the same respect, makes wonderful parallels to the original account.
In the story, Emma sees her socially inferior friend, Harriet Smith, being terrified and harassed by a bunch of beggar children. In Clueless, Harriet has reinvented herself as a trashy new school girl named Tai (Brittany Murphy) who is completely afraid of her very masculine boys at the mall.
In the novel, as Emma and Harriet have grown to be alien to each other about Mr. Knightley, Emma in one of the letters received by Harriet felt that there was some resentment in it. The movie also highlights such contempt when Tai tells Cher: "You can't drive and you are a virgin." Tai, feeling the truth of the stab, can do little more than retort wistfully, in a plaintive key, That was way harsh, Tai.
The ever-radiant Silverstone, her description is handled with a kittenish sensitiveness of which the sentence quoted will convey precisely the right tone of self-discovery and humiliation (as also her commentary a moment later: "I could feel the lumps begin to rise in my throat"). In her Cher, Austen projects a heroine in the year 1815, what she had dreamed a century and 80 years ago. Emma should be excellent Silverstone is perfect
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