Jane Austen for Generation Z

The success of a literary adaptation depends on the fragile balance between fidelity to the original text and its necessary betrayal. As was the case with the revered Sense and Sensibility of 1995 directed by Ang Lee and written by one of its actresses, Emma Thompson, the new adaptation directed by Georgia Oakley positions itself far enough from the original work to boast a personality of its own. The bet made by the director of Blue Jean (a striking lesbian drama set in Thatcher's England) is to bring Austen's modern and immortal work to contemporary audiences through a naturalistic, pictorial aesthetic (the film is shot on 35mm) and an intimate style that recalls the cinema of Jane Campion or Sofia Coppola and shows the Dashwood sisters as never before: talking lazily in bed or running through desolate natural landscapes with messy hair or mud-stained dresses.

As in the Little Women by Greta Gerwig, although without her boldness in completely reinterpreting the original, the central theme of this brilliant new adaptation is the emotional relationship between Elinor and Marianne, the radically different sisters whom Daisy Edgar-Jones and, above all, a volcanic and stellar Esmé Creed-Miles embody with a deeply contemporary look and acting style.