New reviews of Wide Sargasso Sea and Dame Darcy's Jane Eyre

A.A. Gill in The Sunday Times gives his opinion on the recent BBC4 adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea. Once again, do you remember his extremely silly review of Jane Eyre? he makes a new display of clichés (and pretty inconsistent with his previous review).

Wide Sargasso Sea (Monday, BBC4) might have been another nature film. Unfortunately, it was an adaptation of Jean Rhys’s slim, hallucinatory novel, the prequel to Jane Eyre, which by happy chance is already having a rather good outing at the moment. The production of Sargasso has none of the imaginative style of its Brontë predecessor. This was the usual am-dram tat of historical repro, dreadful wigs, interiors that looked like hotel rooms and costumes nobody moves about in with ease because they’ve never worn them before. The camera moves about like an insurance assessor with a Zimmer frame. I never managed to finish Rhys’s book, but I remember its long, discursive passages. The camera lingers on wafting curtains, empty rooms, fruit bowls, close-ups of hands with glasses, which is traditionally how adaptations deal with interpreting long, descriptive sections of novels.

But the real problem is Rochester. Why on earth would a beautiful woman of independent means marry this penniless, charmless younger son? Rafe Spall doesn’t help us by keeping his attractive characteristics to himself. He makes Rochester petulant, venal, bored, insensitive, mendacious, grasping, mean and stupid, and that’s before he gets drunk and starts shagging the help. Rafe is a peculiarly contemporary actor. He looks, moves and sounds like a city oik.

Irrationally, I’m more annoyed than I should be by his spelling Rafe phonetically rather than correctly, like Richardson and Fiennes. I know this is a petty snobbery and reflects worse on me than it does on him. Still, in this case, his classy pretensions are way outclassed by Rebecca Hall, who plays the maddening first Mrs Rochester. She looks like a nubile, tipsy vicuña, which is a look that, incidentally, has always done it for me.

On another note, The Times also reviews the book The Dirty Bits For Girls, edited by India Knigh. At the end of the review we find this comment:

Just because young women are surrounded by sex doesn’t mean they’re not still curious, anxious, problematically (to them) naive or trepidatious: I think they’re more anxious than ever. After all, knowing about some arcane sexual practice because you’ve seen it online doesn’t exempt you from wondering what kissing might feel like. The answer’s in Jane Eyre. Sometimes, the old ones are the best.

Yes, we can agree with that :).

Finally, another review of the new edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by DameDarcy appears. This time on A Wandering Eye:

This volume belongs in the library of any Bronte aficionado. There are many things which will endear this book to its readers. After the title page of this volume, a replica of the title page from the original first edition appears with the author appearing as Currer Bell, the name under which Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre. The original foreword by the author to the second edition is also included and was a joy to read. The pages are rough cut, like folio pages. All of this would have been enough to make this bibliophile swoon, but then there are also illustrations.

The illustrations, of course, are what make this a truly lovely volume. Dame Darcy, of whom I had not previously heard, has created drawings that are gothic, dark, and playful. They reminded me a bit of Edward Gorey, though Dame Darcy has a style all her own. (read more)

Categories: In_the_News, Movies-DVD-TV, Wide_Sargasso_Sea, Jane Eyre, Books, Comics