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NANCY MITFORD’S The Pursuit Of Love is one of those books about aristocrats behaving preposterously that touches readers across class. Within her witty study of the repercussions of the glaringly awful, borderline sadistic way posh people bring up their children, Mitford proved herself an expert on the madness of young desire, to which we can all relate. If you haven’t read it, honestly, make haste.
The televised version of this interwar classic has been written and directed by Emily Mortimer. It arrives shadowed by tabloid infamy, after star Lily James, who plays hysterically lovestruck anti-heroine Linda Radlett, was papped on the back of a moped with her screen father Matthew (Dominic West) while filming in Rome last year. West responded with a series of stagemanaged photo opportunities snuggling his wife, including a note posted on their front wall attesting to the strength of their marriage. None of which will do The Pursuit Of Love’s bid for attention any harm.
The drama on screen is just as sizzling, if a touch heavy-handed. Linda’s life is told by her closest cousin, Fanny (Emily Beecham), daughter of an errant mother known as ‘The Bolter’ (played by Mortimer), on account of her tendency to leave lovers once bored. Fanny is the Saffy to The Bolter’s Edina, the square child who seems to have skipped her mother’s impetuousness gene. Instead, Linda has inherited that, as she sits in a cupboard inventing a world for she and Fanny to inhabit while Daddy keeps them firmly under lock and key. West’s Uncle Matthew spends a good deal of his screen time brandishing his hunting whips, terrorising livestock, caterwauling at Linda and looking totally extra with his clipped moustache.
James’s Linda is fabulously raw, a physically unravelling ball of oestrogen desperate to leave the stern grasp of her father and score her passport to freedom: a man. It’s comfortably James’s most memorable role yet. Mortimer’s directing style borrows a little too openly from Sofia Coppola and Danny Boyle, setting debutante montages to a hipster soundtrack and jump-starting her edits with punky abandon. It’s artistic theft you can’t help but imagine the gloriously mischievous Nancy Mitford would have approved of. A hit. Begins Sunday 9 May, 9pm, BBC One