How do you explain the Jane Austen bandwagon, which rolls on full steam with Becoming Jane, an imitation screen adaptation of an Austen-like novel that imagines the author's romantic life at 20? Austen's refined language, which Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood's screenplay does a reasonably good job of capturing, is part of the charm. In the age of "whatever," who doesn't relish receiving a scrupulously considered, grammatically correct answer to a question?
Austen's reassuring brand of sense and sensibility, grounded in wit and sound moral judgment, is another attraction. To literate Anglophiles, Austen and everything she represents looms as a symbolic bulwark against the values of today's babelicious Babylon. The premarital meat market of her era was reassuringly prim.
"Tainted by suspicion" is the nastiest description applied by one woman to another in this film, which plays as a fanciful, scenic (but not too opulent) prequel to Pride and Prejudice. That slur is directed at Jane by the wealthy and snobbish Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith), whose beloved nephew Mr Wisley (Laurence Fox) is dissuaded from marrying Jane after she considers, then reconsiders, eloping with her true love.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF TA LAI
Like a modern chick-lit heroine, Jane has no interest in marrying a juiceless man, rich or poor, who has the imagination and charisma of a stick. An aspiring novelist in a rigid social order in which women of conspicuous intelligence are frowned upon, she is willing to take her chances. At its most hardheaded, the film makes clear that when Jane forfeits her best opportunity for a financially advantageous match it is no laughing matter.
These imagined Austens live in genteel poverty. Jane's father (James Cromwell) is a parish preacher, and the family's hopes for a comfortable future depend on its daughters landing rich husbands. As Jane's fussbudget mother (Julie Walters) observes, "Affection is desirable; money is absolutely indispensable."
Jane, however, is determined to marry for love or not all. When Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), a rakish young Irish lawyer-in-training, comes along, it is him or nothing. Tom gives her a copy of Henry Fielding's History of Tom Jones, a Foundling to educate her about sex.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF TA LAI
Austen, as we know, never married. And the movie implies that Tom was the real Mr Darcy, minus his fortune; hence, no marriage. Becoming Jane, directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous movie was the garish comedy Kinky Boots, drives home the painfully limited options facing British women of limited means in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
At country dances and balls, grown-ups scrutinize the behavior of blushing young women on the marriage block. Fun may be had, but the festivities are fraught with anxiety and calculation.
Becoming Jane is a triumph for Anne Hathaway, who brings to the young Jane the same jittery wide-eyed intensity she displayed in The Devil Wears Prada along with a secure British accent. She and McAvoy inject a keen intelligence into the couple's verbal jousts, along with romantic chemistry.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF TA LAI
While Jane struggles to assert some independence, Tom squirms under the iron thumb of his humorless authoritarian uncle, Judge Langlois (Ian Richardson, in his last film role), who wields the purse strings. Everything about Jane, but especially her irony, offends this grim hanging judge, who hands out death sentences with a thunderous righteousness.
Hathaway, who is almost too pretty for the role, recalls the young Judy Garland, with her panicky stare and cherry lips. McAvoy's sexy, good-bad boy, especially in profile, resembles Bob Dylan in his early troubadour mode. With his taste for booze, bare-knuckle boxing and the occasional prostitute, Tom also suggests a whippet version of the young Albert Finney in Tom Jones.
Not much is known about the actual Austen-Lefroy relationship except that they met at a ball in 1795 around the time she had begun an early novel that was later reworked as Sense and Sensibility and that she described him in a letter to her sister, Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin), as "a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man." At a ball they apparently caused tongues to wag by sharing three dances instead of the regulation two.
The real-life Lefroy eventually married a wealthy Irish woman with whom he sired seven children and became a successful lawyer. The fanciful coda to Becoming Jane imagines a reunion between the grown-up Jane and Tom, now both slightly graying.
The screenplay's pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film. A scene suggesting oral sex between Jane's parents is one. (Ugh!) And after Jane and Tom's first kiss, when Jane coyly inquires about her osculatory technique, you may want to howl.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located