Persuasion (1995)

Viisasteleva sydän / Övertalning. GB 1995. PC: BBC Films – distributed by Sony. P: Fiona Finway. D: Roger Michell. SC: Nick Dear – based on the novel (1817) by Jane Austen (translated into Finnish by Kristiina Kivivuori, 1951). CIN: John Daly – negative: 35 mm (Eastman Kodak) – color –1,85:1. PD: William Dudley. AD: Linda Ward. VFX: Colin Gorry. Cost: Alexandra Byrne. Makeup: Jean Speak. M: Jeremy Sams. S: Terry Elms. ED: Kate Evans.
    C: Amanda Root (Anne Elliot), Ciarán Hinds (Captain Frederick Wentworth), Susan Fleetwood (Lady Russell), Corin Redgrave (Sir Walter Elliot), Fiona Shaw (Mrs. Croft), John Woodwine (Admiral Croft), Phoebe Nicholls (Elizabeth Elliot), Samuel West (Mr. Elliot), Sophie Thompson (Mary Musgrove), Simon Russell Beale (Charles Musgrove), Felicity Dean (Mrs. Clay), Robert Glenister (Capt. Harville), Richard McCabe (Capt. Benwick), Victoria Hamilton (Henrietta Musgrove), Emma Roberts (Louisa Musgrove), Roger Hammond (Mr. Musgrove), Helen Schlesinger (Mrs. Smith).
    Loc: Bath, Lyme Regis (Dorset), Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire.
    A television film first telecast on 16 April 1995 on BBC Two and first released theatrically on 27 Sep 1995 in the U.S.
    Helsinki premiere: 3.5.1996 Nordia 1 distributed by Warner Bros. Finland Oy with Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Anna-Lisa Holmqvist – telecast 3.11.2000 ja 4.1.2002 YLE TV1 – VET 99733 – S – 2940 m / 108 min
    Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki (Jane Austen [Bicentennial of Death]), 20 July 2017.

A BBC prestige production, a film of quality, a period drama, a heritage film, an illustrated classic, a film belonging to the mid-1990s cycle of six Jane Austen film adaptations, Roger Michell's debut as a (tv) film director. For the theatre and television actress Amanda Root Persuasion became a screen debut when the film was released theatrically.

While watching the film I'm in the middle of reading Austen's novel and critical comments on it, including those of Tuomas Anhava ("Sydän ja klassikko" ["The Heart and a Classic"], which inspire me in these remarks.

Tuomas Anhava (1927–2001) was a poet, un homme de lettres and a formidable critic known as the Pope in Finnish literary world. For him, two novelists were above others: Austen and Tolstoy, and Austen even higher of them in purely literary quality. Persuasion was Anhava's favourite Austen novel.

"She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning."

This is an exceptional characterization of an unusual protagonist. Persuasion was written during a period of romanticism, but Jane Austen was always a writer of the enlightenment, and this double vision – viewing romance with the eyes of a realist – is her hallmark. In this essential feature the film adaptation is faithful to Austen.

An attractive detail in the story is the prominence of the romantic poems of Scott and Byron. Austen does not share their sensibilities but her characters communicate their feelings via them.

Persuasion, the last novel Austen finished for publication before her death, is exceptional since it is about love. The focus of her other main novels is on marriage, not exactly the same thing. Persuasion is also exceptional because there are not many grand scenes and dialogues. It is more an interior story, a masterpiece of fine psychological observation. Consequently, it is also the work of the most immediate warmth and sympathy among Austen's novels. In Persuasion Austen is more inspired by nature, including landscapes and the seasons, than in her other novels.

Roger Michell's film adaptation takes full advantage of the prominence of the landscape and the seasons in expressive scenes shot in Gloucestershire (Kellynch Hall), Lyme, and Bath. The land and the sea are the twin milieus important in the novel and the film. The colours of the seasons have psychological and symbolical significance.

The film picks up in intensity towards the end, balancing tact and passion. The all-important concert and letter-writing scenes are powerfully interpreted by Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds.

But perhaps no film adaptation can do justice to Jane Austen's masterpiece. The subtle interiority of the novel, the full psychological insight with shades of a self-portrait cannot be translated into a drama or a movie. Persuasion was Austen's most mature novel, the one where her sense of humour was at its most refined. That experience only the novel itself can convey.

It is interesting to imagine a Yasujiro Ozu adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, starring Setsuko Hara. The marriage mania with an underlying sense that the heroine would be in many ways better off unmarried.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: OUR PROGRAM NOTE BY JARI SEDERGREN:
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: OUR PROGRAM NOTE BY JARI SEDERGREN:

On ehkä yllättävää, että ohjaajana Roger Michell teki debyytin elokuvallaan Viisasteleva sydän (1995). 1990-luvun puolivälissä elettiin Austen-renessanssia tai jopa Austenmaniaa, sillä yhteenlaskettuna lyhyessä ajassa valmistui peräti kuusi Austen-tuotantoa parin vuoden aikana. Kun Viisasteleva sydän oli tekeillä, samanaikaisesti tekeillä – ilmeisesti varsin pitkälle toisistaan tietämättä – olivat myös tv-sarja Ylpeys ja ennakkoluulo ja näytelmäelokuva Järki ja tunteet.

Austenin kuolinvuonna 1817 ilmestynyt romaani alkoi muuntua näytelmäelokuvaksi englantilaisen tuottajan Fiona Finlayn ajatuksissa jo aikaisin. ITV-televisioyhtiö oli tehnyt siihen TV-sarjan jo 1970-luvun alussa ja Filnlay ajattelil tarinan olevan ”hyvin romanttinen”, johon ”kuka tahansa voisi ottaa suhteen”. ”Kauan sitten menetetyssä rakkaudessa on jotakin hyvin koskettavaa”.

Tehtävään värvätty käsikirjoittaja Nick Dear harkitsi ensin toisten Austenien romaanien sovittamista, mutta päätyi hänkin Viisastelevaan sydämeen, koska piti tarinaa muista kypsempänä. Vaikka se olikin vain ”Tuhkimo-hiivalla käytetty rakkaustarina”, siinä oli jotakin realistista ja totuutta, erityisesti kun se kertoo kahden kauan sitten eronneen ihmisen paluusta yhteen. Tarinassa isä on pakottanut tyttärensä luopumaan köyhästä kosijasta, mutta unohtamiseen ei voi pakottaa, kun merillä vauras-tunut sulho palaa takaisin keskelle tilannetta, jossa tytön perhe on kokenut kovia ja menettänyt vakaan asemansa.

Käsikirjoitusvaihe kesti kaksi vuotta. Erityinen ongelma oli siinä, että päähenkilö tuskin lainkaan puhui ensimmäisen puoliskon aikana – tämä vaikeutti toiminnan dramatisoitumista. Helppoa ei ollut myöskään Austenin terävän kielen sovittaminen, sillä kirjailija luonnehtii niissä henkilöitään, eivätkä määreet tule niinkään henkilöiltä itseltään.

Jos ohjaaja oli ensikertalainen, niin oli myös pääosan esittäjä Anne Elliot. Hänen itsensä mukaan ”lähes jokainen näyttelijätär Englannissa luki osan”. Susan Fleetwoodille, joka näyttelee Lady Russellin roolin, elokuva jäi taas viimeiseksi.

– Jari Sedergren 20.7.2017

Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen
A review of the publication of R.W. Chapman’s edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, in Five Volumes.
By Virginia Woolf
January 30, 1924

Anybody who has had the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of two facts: First, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighborhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts.

It would be interesting, indeed, to inquire how much of her present celebrity Jane Austen owes to masculine sensibility; to the fact that her dress was becoming, her eyes bright, and her age the antithesis in all matters of female charm to our own. A companion inquiry might investigate the problem of George Eliot’s nose; and decide how long it will be before the equine profile is once again in favor, and the Oxford Press celebrates the genius of the author of Middlemarch in an edition as splendid, as authoritative, and as exquisitely illustrated as this.

But it is not mere cowardice that prompts us to say nothing of the six novels of the new edition. It is impossible to say too much about the novels that Jane Austen did write; but enough attention perhaps has never yet been paid to the novels that Jane Austen did not write. Owing to the peculiar finish and perfection of her art, we tend to forget that she died at 42, at the height of her powers, still subject to all those changes which often make the final period of a writer’s career the most interesting of all. Let us take Persuasion, the last completed book, and look by its light at the novels that she might have written had she lived to be 60-years-old. We do not grudge it him, but her brother the Admiral lived to be ninety-one.

There is a peculiar dullness and a peculiar beauty in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on the subject. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, a quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works.”

She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature. She talks of the “influence so sweet and so sad of autumnal months in the country.” She marks “the tawny leaves and withered hedges.”

“One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it,” she observes. But it is not only in a new sensibility to nature that we detect the change.

Her attitude to life itself is altered. She is seeing it, for the greater part of the book, through the eyes of a woman who, unhappy herself, has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others, which, until the very end, she is forced to comment upon in silence. Therefore the observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual. There is an expressed emotion in the scene at the concert and in the famous talk about woman’s constancy which proves not merely the biographical fact that Jane Austen had loved, but the aesthetic fact that she was no longer afraid to say so. Experience, when it was of a serious kind, had to sink very deep, and to be thoroughly disinfected by the passage of time, before she allowed herself to deal with it in fiction. But now, in 1817, she was ready. Outwardly, too, in her circumstances, a change was imminent. Her fame had grown very slowly. “I doubt,” wrote Mr. Austen Leigh, “whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity was so complete.” Had she lived a few more years only, all that would have been altered.

She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure. And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the Battery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvelous little speeches which sum up in a few minutes’ chatter all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove forever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is. She would have stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: she died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.”

From a reprint in New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/115922/virginia-woolf-jane-austen