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 in the revered Sense and Sensibility of 1995 directed by Ang Lee and written by one of its actresses, Emma Thompson –no, although it may seem like a lie, that image engraved in our retinas in which Alan Rickman carried Kate Winslet in his arms in the rain did not exist in the novel by Jane Austen–, the new adaptation directed by Georgia Oakley stands at a sufficient distance from the original work to boast its own personality.

The bet of the director of Blue Jean (a striking lesbian drama set in Thatcher's England) is to bring Austen's modern and immortal work closer to the contemporary audience 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 indolently in bed or running through desolate natural landscapes, disheveled or with their dresses stained with mud.

As with Little Women by Greta Gerwig, although without their boldness when it comes to 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, stellar Esmé Creed-Miles embody from a deeply contemporary physiognomy and acting register.