I've been watching the comments on 2022 Persuasion unfold in real time. It's been a wild ride.
It hadn't even been on my radar until selkie linked me the Slate review and then wow.
I agree that Richard E. Grant is probably superb, but what they thought they were playing at with the rest of it is beyond me. Subversion, possibly, according to the reviewer quoted above.
Writing and directing for (ironic tildes around this next phrase) modern sensibilities may account for the rest, it belatedly occurred to me to consider. "If you're a 5 in London, you're a 10 in Bath" is the kind of anachronism that wouldn't be out of place in historical romances I have encountered where characters use phrases like "brain fuckery" and have completely twenty-first century attitudes and language around sexual consent and identity, because otherwise how do we know they are good and sympathetic people? I should be clear that I don't have a problem with anachronism per se. Some of my favorite historical films are full of it. But it has to feel like it's doing something other than suggesting that the past is at its best and most relevant when it's indistinguishable from the present with different clothes on and it really sounds like this Persuasion just blew it.
no subject
It hadn't even been on my radar until
I agree that Richard E. Grant is probably superb, but what they thought they were playing at with the rest of it is beyond me. Subversion, possibly, according to the reviewer quoted above.
Writing and directing for (ironic tildes around this next phrase) modern sensibilities may account for the rest, it belatedly occurred to me to consider. "If you're a 5 in London, you're a 10 in Bath" is the kind of anachronism that wouldn't be out of place in historical romances I have encountered where characters use phrases like "brain fuckery" and have completely twenty-first century attitudes and language around sexual consent and identity, because otherwise how do we know they are good and sympathetic people? I should be clear that I don't have a problem with anachronism per se. Some of my favorite historical films are full of it. But it has to feel like it's doing something other than suggesting that the past is at its best and most relevant when it's indistinguishable from the present with different clothes on and it really sounds like this Persuasion just blew it.
Maybe there'll be a supercut of Grant's scenes.