Jane Austen with a f lick of Fleabag? Well, I didn’t take a lot of Persuasion!
MATTHEW BOND
Persuasion
Cert: PG, 1hr 47mins ★★★★☆ Thor: Love And Thunder
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 5mins ★★★☆☆
Brian And Charles Cert: PG, 1hr 30mins ★★★☆☆
What would Jane Austen have made of Fleabag? That’s not a question I ever expected to ask, let alone try to answer. But it’s the question that will be on everyone’s lips once they’re five minutes into the new film adaptation of Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, which is enjoying a brief run in cinemas before heading to Netflix on Friday.
For while all the bodices, bonnets and empire-line frocks you would expect of any self-respecting Austen adaptation are certainly there, suddenly our heroine, Anne Elliot – she who once loved the dashing Captain Wentworth but eight lonely years later fears she will never love again – is addressing the camera directly, pulling funny faces and even trying out some gentle sexual innuendo. Yes, she’s gone the full Phoebe WallerBridge: arch, knowing and funny.
Austen purists will probably be horrified, but the longer it goes on, the more I warmed to it, won over by Dakota Johnson’s persuasive central performance as Anne and by the creative commitment demonstrated by acclaimed theatre director turned debutante filmmaker Carrie Cracknell.
I even have a sneaky feeling that
Austen herself might have approved: she was fond of an innovative narrative device and remains a funnier writer than she’s often given credit for.
The end result is something of a period romp, stylistically a million miles from Roger Michell’s classic TV film version from a quarter of a century ago, starring Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds. Instead it’s much closer to the likes of Bridgerton and Jane Austen’s Sanditon on television, and to more recent bigscreen Austen adaptations such as the excellent Love & Friendship with Kate Beckinsale and the delicious recent reinterpretation of Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Bill Nighy.
Johnson is probably too conventionally pretty to convince totally (this Anne would have naval captains queuing around the block in Bath), but is winning company, while Cosmo Jarvis – so good in Calm With Horses – channels Colin Firth to good effect as Wentworth, and Nikki Amuka-Bird makes a spirited and sexy Lady Russell.
With jarring modern mentions of ‘playlists’, attractiveness measured in marks out of ten and ‘exes’ (as in ex-boyfriend, etc), this Persuasion won’t be for everybody but it is definitely fun. And, eventually, quite touching too.
Thor: Love And Thunder is the fourth film in the Marvel sub-franchise and the second in a row to be directed by New Zealander Taika Waititi. The slight problem is that everything that seemed so bright, shiny and innovative in Thor: Ragnarok seems less so second time around as Thor and a select gang (Valkyrie, Korg and a returning Jane Foster) rush around the universe trying to stop Gorr the God Butcher (an unrecognisable
Christian Bale channelling a lot of Voldemort) killing off the divinities with his deadly ‘necrosword’.
The opening half-hour or so is confusing, Waititi’s energetic com
mitment to Thor’s comic-book origins more trying this time and it’s a shame his voice performance as Korg comes so soon after his contribution to Lightyear. Chris Hemsworth, however, is still very funny as Thor, Russell Crowe’s hoot of a turn as a Greekaccented Zeus is not to be missed and you can play spot-the-silly-starrycameo during the dull bits.
Brian And Charles is an eccentric British film that made it into the Sundance Film Festival this year and is about a lonely inventor – the Brian of the title, played by After Life star David Earl – in rural Wales who decides to make a robot. And unlike most of Brian’s inventions, Charles – or Charles Petruscu, to give the washing-machine-bodied robot his full name – unexpectedly works.
What ensues is quirky, quite amusing and slightly touching, but it never quite shakes off the feeling that this is a short film (from 2017) that has been turned into a feature film without quite enough thought.