Reactions to BBC's Wide Sargasso Sea (II)

The airing yesterday, October 22, on BBC-One of Wide Sargasso Sea has triggered another dose of comments and reactions (to be added to the ones posted before, when it was first aired in BBC-Four).

Caitlin Moran comments on The Times:

Wide Sargasso Sea (Sunday, BBC Two), the prequel to Jane Eyre, got the bump from BBC Four to BBC One this weekend — primarily because you don’t shoot a drama expensively on location in Jamaica, and then hide it away on Ocado FM.

Wide Sargasso Sea was, broadly speaking, a petticoaty shag-fest — scarcely ten minutes went by without Rochester and his missus having a sweaty, spicey Caribbean bunk-up, before descending into recriminations and sulking. The first Mrs Rochester, Antoinette, was a toothy, doe-eyed, hello-trees, hello-skies ingénue — basically Jane Birkin doing Je t’aime moi non plus, for real. Mr Rochester, meanwhile, was uptight, insecure and compromised by everyone’s desire that he should marry.

The third lead in the drama was Jamaica — making everyone sweat, sending up swarms of flies, putting a whispering, cat-eyed obi-woman at every window. The books rotted, in the tropical dampness, on the shelves. The Rochesters’ marriage rotted, in the heat, in their honeymoon bed.

“Give me peace,” Antoinette had asked, as her condition of marriage, when Rochester proposed. After an hour and a half, he had failed so miserably at this that she threw herself from the battlements of cold Thornfield, and left him free to marry Jane Eyre.

The Scotsman publishes an interview with Rebecca Hall, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. What can you ask about her role in the adaptation of Jean Rhys' novel ? Her emotional impact ? How to avoid clichés playing a character that is losing the contact with reality ? No, there's another question far more important:

Hall can be seen on the small screen tonight at 9pm on BBC1, with the lead role in an adaptation of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she had her first nude scene. But she was left completely unfazed by the experience. "I just think there are probably more invasive things, such as reading your teenage diaries in public, that really lay you naked," she says.

Christopher Whalen in Domheid's blog thinks that:

The dialogue is often dubbed over jumpy editing and creates an unsettling effect, augmented by the heavy soundtrack of wildlife and atmospheric music, when, really, the actors were doing a good enough job by themselves. The soundtrack does, however, recreate the over-sensuous feel of the book, the bewildering over-stimulation of love in a strange place.

And of course you can read the BBC webpage especially devoted to opinions on the film.

Here we can find the ratings. The results, as expected, are long way off Jane Eyre's ones:

BBC One's one-off adaptation of the prequel to Jane Eyre, 'Wide Sargasso Sea' managed to pull in a poor 2.4m viewers, or a 10% share, and a long way off of the 6.7m viewers the final part of 'Jane Eyre' pulled in last week.

EDIT (28/10/06)
Jeremy Taylor reviews the production on his blog in an interesting article.

The TV production left out so much of the novel, and distorted so much of what
was left, that it came across as just another oh-so-tasteful period-costume
drama, Merchant-Ivory style, bland and harmless, its sting and its pain blunted.
Whereas Rhys’s book is really a passionate defence of everything creole against
the Rochesters of the world, a book as biting and relevant as it ever was.

Categories: In_the_News, Movies-DVD-TV, Wide_Sargasso_Sea