Every Friday, The Back Row
compiles a short selection of recommendations for readers’ weekend viewing. The
links are for the convenience of those who wish to stream the films on the suggested websites (make sure it’s available in your territory before
entering your payment details); readers may well prefer other sites with
alternative arrangements for the streaming and downloading of films, and can’t
be stopped from using those instead.
“Metropolitan” (Whit Stillman, 1990)
This week, we passed the
bicentennial of the death of the matchless Jane Austen, responsible for no less
than six of the language’s favourite novels of all time and over thirty direct
adaptations of those works for film and television, not to mention the host of
other movies based on or inspired by stories and characters of her creation. I
myself have seen very few of those adaptations (Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, from 2005, is the
only one not featured in this blog post), but their number and popularity are
enough to set them aside as a genre unto themselves. A far broader and more
pliable genre is that of the loose adaptation, into which Whit Stillman’s
remarkable indie comedy Metropolitan
falls, as inspired by Austen’s Mansfield
Park, along with better known films like Bridget Jones’s Diary (Pride
and Prejudice) and its sequel (Persuasion),
Clueless (Emma), and Material Girls
(Sense and Sensibility).
I’ve never read Mansfield Park, but the characters
themselves of Metropolitan make a
pretty strong case for the novel when they debate its value, and the one
championing it is revealed to be an Austen fanatic (which is hardly to put a
foot wrong for Carolyn Farina’s level-headed and sensitive debutante Audrey)
while the one against it — Edward Clements’s young socialist Tom, whose
class-consciousness and self-consciousness are closely linked — has not only
neglected to read it, but eschews the reading of novels altogether in favour of
literary criticism: “That way, you get both the novelist’s ideas as well as the
critic’s thinking.” It’s particularly shrewd of Stillman, who wrote and produced
the movie in addition to directing it, to reference Austen in this way, and by
it he shows how Austen has become an entrenched part of elitist culture, even
(really, especially) when her name and work are thrown about in conversations
that discuss the hubris and decline of that same American elite. (A
peculiar delight of Stillman’s script is the bandying about of one character’s coined
abbreviation for the class under discussion: U.H.B., which the others shorten
to an acronym, “uhb,” standing for “urban haute bourgeois,” because none of the
other terms like “preppy” or “Wasp” seem quite accurate.)