I’ve just finished watching the BBC adaptation of the Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility novel.I’ve never read a piece but I’ve read 4 out of 6 Austin novels, and I’ve seen already two other Austin adaptations. I also saw the biographical movie about Jane Austin, Becoming Jane. This is my background and I believe by now I’ve earned some credibility to judge the BBC adaptation as a bit more than an idle consumer of the video product.
First off, I appreciate the BBC team for making English accent to sound natural and not as forced as we could hear it in Pride and Prejudice. Then, and that’s what I appreciate most, the way Ms Austin used to depict feelings in her novels is not rallied about or exaggerated to the point of absurd by adding to those feelings an air of the Hollywood honey-sweet pathos but delivered as natural human reactions. While watching Sense and Sensibility one actually believes that those people could have lived once and felt like that, behaved the way they are shown in the series.
Emma is a rom-com set in the wrong decor. While watching Pride and Prejudice one saw the director in his DG shirt reflected in the polished gloss of his actors and kept wondering if they still sell that fake eyelashes Keira Knightly wears with discount… Not that these two above mentioned movies aren’t good, they are. They really are. Pride and Prejudice is actually a really worthy movie, a love story one would definitely enjoy. And the same is Becoming Jane drama – each movie Hollywood touches becomes glossy and pathetic.
Sense and Sensibility is a story of two very different sisters searching for happiness. And some might say the original plot is predictable, or Austin heroes are always depicted ridiculously romantically, and her prose in general is inapplicable to reality (even the 19th century’s one) – the creators of the BBC series have found a way to show how Jane Austin works. I myself have always been critical about Ms Austin’s knowledge of human character, her ability to describe something probable and credible, something plausible. The BBC Sense and Sensibility adaptation convinced me otherwise.
