“When pain is over,” Jane Austen wrote in her final novel, Persuasion, “the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.” If only this could be said to apply to the Netflix film adaptation of the book, which provided me with 107 excruciating minutes of viewing that are yet to become more pleasurable in hindsight. This adaptation takes Austen’s most subtle, mature work – the story of the love lost and eventually reignited between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, beloved by readers for its poignant, autumnal sensibility – and unthinkingly slaps on a sassy, self-consciously millennial tone in an embarrassing attempt to force the brashest form of cultural relevancy onto a timeless novel.
The film, written by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow and directed by Carrie Cracknell, takes Persuasion’s perceptive, sensitive, yet composed Anne Elliot and transforms her into a popular stereotype: the dejected, rejected rom-com heroine who wallows in wine and ice cream and reliably embarrasses herself in social situations by being “too much”. It opens with Anne (Dakota Johnson) declaring that, for the past eight years, since a painful break-up, she has been “single and thriving” – as we watch a montage of her drinking red wine straight from the bottle, weeping in the bath, and lying face down on her bed in a messy room. This is a character who is immediately familiar to us, only not from the novel from which she is supposedly taken.
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