Movie - Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley)

How is it that Pride and Prejudice has entered the canon? This one is the Spunky Pride and Prejudice. It manages to be loudly authentic (pigs in the yard) yet gratingly anachronistic (Donald Sutherland's teeth). To me its main contribution to the P&P oeuvre is the milieu in which the Bennetts live (ooh - 5 points off for two French words in one sentence). I have not studied the period, but I am always curious about daily life in historical times. So, would the laundry have been drying right there or would it have been out of sight. Even if their living came from farming, would the barns and animals have been right there? Did they really do nothing all day as in past versions of P&P, except swan around reading and listening to untalented Mary play the pianoforte? Or did they do needlework and other homely tasks most of the time. I loved the ball - it was so countrified and crowded. You could imagine Darcy and Bingley thinking that his event was one step up from the peasantry and no more. Yet the couple keeps having rendezvous on the moors, in the ha-ha, when you wouldn't imagine such a thing would be possible or thinkable. The scene where Miss Bingley asks Elizabeth to "take a turn" around a large but not cavernous room seems more to the point - that Jane Austen characters struggle to find privacy in family and social crowds. This movie keeps shooting itself in the foot - it does the "take a turn" scene so well, yet by showing a cinematic alternative devalues attempts at authenticity. Keira Knightley is a lovely young woman, but she seems to be the only one in the film allowed to wear makeup. Even beautiful Jane looks drab, as does every other woman in the film, even the sophisticated Miss Bingley. Are we supposed to believe that everyone is au naturel and that it's just Elizabeth's bloom? And the teeth! Elizabeth has radioactive $10,000 radioactive teeth. Most people over 19 in that period wouldn't even smile with their lips open their teeth would be so bad. So when Mr. Bennett agrees to allow Elizabeth and Darcy to wed and shows those mega fake, mega white 21st century choppers, they jump out of his low-hygiene 19th century visage like a lightning bolt. What were they thinking?

Last week we rented Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood take on the story. It was startlingly faithful to the book, including the challenge of dowering four daughters for a man of modest means. I felt like Austen's audience would have approved, possibly even the singing and dancing numbers. Whereas this version skimmed some issues important to the period (like the value of a woman's reputation). Because the story is really about assessing a potential partners values (as much as his or her financial worth), it's a bit wobbly without those issues.

The definitive Pride and Prejudice experience: Colin Firth! 1995 BBC miniseries
Less in the heavy breathing way but with a good British ensemble cast, a previous BBC miniseries (1980).

P&P is so classic that is has been parodied many times many ways I'm sure, but the one that comes to my mind is Red Dwarf season 7 where Kochanski makes the others take a turn at her idea of a virtual reality game: Jane Austen world. Of course because the male crew members are playing too, everything ends up exploding anyway.