apolla | Pride and Prejudice... (Reply)

You may know that, against my own better judgement, I went to see Pride and Prejudice the day it came out. I had nothing better to do that Friday night, being stuck in London with no computer and a television in the control of my grandad. I found myself bored for the first few minutes, finding the quaintness of the Eeenglish Countryside annoying.

At the end, I left feeling horribly deflated because it was over. I went to see it again in the cinema, once when I was sick and another time with me mammy, who spent two hours watching and then at the end said "what lovely costumes and scenery" as if that was the important thing to take out of it. This is the same thing she said after Phantom of the Opera, and is understandable from her sewing perspective but hardly the point.

Anyway, I did not expect to like this film, but I'd enjoyed Bride and Prejudice well enough and wanted to give it a chance. Today it came out on DVD and I watched again. Some thoughts:

- I hate Jane Austen. I really do. I hate the way she writes, I hate the way she's supposed to be 'ironic' but isn't really. Don't try and persuade me otherwise, I have read her and it's my opinion, OK?

- I love this story. I will be honest. The story is great. Like Harry Potter, I find the writing sub-par but the story itself absorbing.

- Yes, Darcy is the perfectest character ever put on a page. Yes he's perfect and lovely and super and don't we all love Darcy?

I do like this film version better than the BBC version, I really do. That's too much of the quaint and twee and the everything terribly pretty and perfect. In the film, the Bennets really do show their stately poverty. The house is ramshackle, the furniture old and the clothes really rather worn, as opposed to in the BBC one, where they all look so fabulous that you wonder what the fuss is.

I also prefer Matthew Mcfadyen to Colin Firth, OK? I'm sure that you'll be after me with pitchforks and stuff, but I don't care. Colin Firth is a perfectly adequate actor, handsome enough and I like him in other stuff too... but he's not my idea of Darcy. I don't know that the Spooks Man is either, but perhaps I've got a picture in my head that's somewhere between the two. I suspect that all we mortal females have a picture of our own Darcy in our head. Even stone-hearted bints like me. And no, I don't miss that stupid lake scene. Big deal, people!

But the reason I like this film so much is the fact that it succeeds in a manner that most book adaptations don't: It manages to capture the point of the story, the feeling and the everything without forcing us to sit through every line of the bloody thing. It is a film of a story rather than the film of a book. It has allowed me to really like a film of a book I didn't particularly enjoy by a writer I hate. That's pretty impressive.

To end, I shall finish with a joke from Mock the Week on Friday. "Things You Probably Won't Hear At The Oscars":

And the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film goes to... Pride and Prejudice.