Review – Lost in Austen
July 31st, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Movie Critic
This ITV series, filmed in 2008, stars Jemima Rooper as the modern-day heroine Amanda Price, Gemma Arterton as Elizabeth Bennett and Elliott Cowan as Darcy. It begins with a nonsensical time travelling premise: Amanda opens her shower one morning only to find a curious Eliza Bennett there, having crawled through from an Austenic universe in a spirit of exploration and adventure.
You can figure in the usual amazement and incredulity of the characters regarding any fictional time-travelling conceit. Amanda certainly, being utterly obsessed with Pride & Prejudice and despairing of the possibility of romance in the twenty-first century, might well have explored a mental-health scenario in her hypotheses.
Beyond that, on exploring the passageway between the two worlds, Amanda gets stuck and finds it closed up when she wants to go back. Stuck in a world of crinolines and Regency balls, she does the best she can to explain her presence (as a friend of Elizabeth’s) and is accepted as a houseguest. Doing her best to fit in, she finds it more difficult than she would have thought. Twenty-first century oaths slip out, her clothes are vastly unsuitable, she can’t dance and her manners are appalling. It’s tougher than she would have thought to navigate Regency England, however well she thought she understood it.
And then there’s Darcy. Strangely, out of all the characters he’s the least sympathetic. Strange, because it’s exactly what one would expect, in a way: yet his character faults are demonstrated as more fundamental and less forgivable than in the book he springs from. Other characters are similarly surprising: the Bennet girls are all endearing, including Mary and Lydia. Miss Bingley has surprising tastes. Mr Collins is deeply creepy, and Wickham – while up to a point being the rascal Jane Austen painted – has a good heart and a sense of humour. He has been unfairly painted as a blackguard.
He is the one who assists her in her struggles to fit in with society, and when everything in the storyline begins to go horribly wrong. Amanda herself begins to fall for Darcy, and he for her. Other characters stray alarmingly from their proper trajectories, and Amanda is convinced that she must bring Elizabeth Bennett back to her proper place, time and literary sphere in order to put things right.
Eventually – expectantly – through the machinations of the plot, Darcy intrudes into 21st century London, and his fear and appalment are unkindly amusing. Amanda’s efforts put things back, if not quite into the places they might have otherwise occupied, at least into a satisfactory relation to each other. And yet her final romantic choice wrecks her well-intentioned meddling. She has extracted a particular promise that will mend Jane’s heart and set Elizabeth and Darcy on a promising course. And yet one wild risky decision could wreck that at a stroke. It’s uncertain whether this is the intent of the story, or the writers merely missed the logical progression from this final twist.
Does she take that fatal choice? You could always buy the box set and see.
Copyright Ollie Hicks, 2009.
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Ollie Hicks is a graduate in Biochemistry and Pharmacology, a freelance writer and has a strong interest in the modern craft movement.
