[happiness-already-here]

Отдельно хочется отметить подругу детства Джейн - Helen Burns. Она мне очень понравилась в фильме 96 года. Длинные волнистые рыжие волосы, немного печальные ясные глаза, доброе лицо... )

6 фоток

К чему это все? Да просто лил говорит, что глазами чуточку на нее похожа. (и рядом с ней мне так хочется быть Джейн хР шутка))

Ну и - на память.
ссылка, если что

тут много текста

«The latest “Jane Eyre” movie



Earlier in the year, I wrote a long, rambling post comparing the different screen adaptations of Jane Eyre…. in a nutshell, Charlotte Bronte’s seminal work of English literature is one of my all time favourite stories, despite the fact that I consider it to be an extremely flawed piece of work, and the various screen adaptations I find delightful and infuriating in equal measure… I think the thing that gets my goat about both the original novel and the various screen adaptations is that they seem to be skirting the edge of perfection, they all do certain things extraordinarily well… but there’s always something that each version does horribly wrong, something that stops it from reaching it’s full potential, at least in my eyes.

Basically, the novel has atmosphere in spades and the dialogue is loaded with much snappy wit, and I like how the central characters are so flawed and human… however, the narrative structure can be infuriating at times… like so many novels of that era, the third act is a pile up of improbably convenient coincidences, and Jane, such an endearingly proactive character early on, is reduced to a passive player towards the finale, things just happen to her and life works itself out a tad too neatly for my tastes… the didacticism is also laid on very thick, you can bet that if Charlotte Bronte has an opinion about something, it’s going to be rammed down the reader’s throat with absolutely zero subtlety – also, without exception, every single character who has a philosophical view radically different to the author’s own will be depicted as an unsympathetic caricature. Now, I do agree with many of Bronte’s views, but I find many of her arguments hard to take seriously when she’s stacked the deck so much in her favour, basically setting up the opposition as a bunch of straw men.

Then there’s the various screen versions. I’ve been into this at length before, but in a nutshell…. the 1943, 1997 and 2006 versions are visually striking, and feature eloquent performances from the actresses playing Jane (Joan Fontaine, Samantha Morton and Ruth Wilson respectively) but are derailed by the hilarious overacting of the leading men (Orson Welles, Ciaran Hinds and Toby Stephens)… the 1996 version also has much to reccommend it purely as a piece of cinema, it’s visually beautiful in it’s own way, but it sanitises many of the darker aspects of the story and the two lead actors (Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt) are both way too, well, ”nice” and “soft” to be playing these damaged and world-weary characters… there was a TV mini-series adaptation in 1983, which was a plodding blow-by-blow slog through the novel, directed with less visual flair than your average daytime soap opera…. there’s this 1970 TV movie version, starring Susannah York and George C Scott, that I actually think captures the spirit of the novel very well, but the quality of the DVD transfer is shockingly bad.

Which brings us to the 2011 version, which, I’m sad to say, doesn’t break the pattern… it’s yet another “flawed masterpiece”, a film which does a lot of things brilliantly and seems to be skirting the edge of greatness – but it never quite gets there.



When I heard that Cary Fukunaga (whose only previous movie was the gritty crime drama Sin Nombre) was directing a new version of Jane Eyre, from a sсript by Moira Buffini (whose only previous movie was the snappy romantic comedy Tamara Drewe) I expected something very different from the finished result…. I expected that Fukunaga would eschew the usual period film scenery porn in favour of a more subdued and intimate visual aesthetic… similarly, I expected that a writer like Buffini would tone down Bronte’s purple prose and replace it with more naturalistic dialogue. In short, I expected a starkly modern adaptation that would give this much revered tome a good shaking up…

But the exact opposite is the case. Fukunaga adopts a very lush, ornately stylized, approach to the visuals of Jane Eyre, rather than the grittily realistic take on things one might expect, given his background…. Buffini’s screenplay is very mannered and self conciously literary, rather than the modern, irreverent approach one might expect from her CV… in fact, the film’s central failing is that it treats Bronte’s novel with too much respect.

I’m tempted to say that the movie is worth the full price of admission for the lavish visuals alone. Jane Eyre has some of the best cinematography of any film I’ve seen all year… it’s not just that Fukunaga and his crew have placed the cameras in front of some pretty greenery and let the scenery-porn do all the work, as a lot of period films do nowadays… Fukunaga makes excellent use of light and shadow for dramatic effect, his transitions from one scene to another unfold with a graceful fluidity and he manages to pull off some great shots in the midst of what look like very difficult weather conditions. This might sound absurd, but I must applaud the way Fukunaga made me almost feel the weather sitting in the cinema – his keen eye for detail made me almost feel the rush of wind and rain as Jane wanders lost amongst the wild moors of Yorkshire, and I could feel her relief at finally being able to sit in front of a fire… the way that Fukunaga shoots fire in this film is simply awesome… this is only the second film that the young Fukunaga has directed and already the man has the eye of a master, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for his work in the future….

Fukunaga’s visual virtuosity is aided immeasurably by Dario Marianelli’s graceful score, which creeps and swoons in all the right places, and showcases the deft violin playing of Jack Liebeck, another up and coming virtuoso, whom I will definitely be keeping an ear out for….

I’m afraid I don’t have superlatives enough to do justice to the cast.



I was pleasantly surprised by Mia Wasikowska as Jane – I wasn’t a fan of her going into the film… but she’s now gone and taken the trophy as my favourite screen depiction of this character (not that she cares, I’m sure). It is a subtle, intelligent and multi-layered performance… she has just the right mixture of youthful naivete, steely moral resolve and blossoming sexuality that the role requires… she has such an extraordinarily expressive face, and communicates so much with a simple turn of the head or arched eyebrow, and she’s the only actress I’ve seen play Jane who actually attempts an authentic Yorkshire accent – every other actress I’ve seen play the role have just gone for the “neutral British” sound…. and it does also make a difference that Wasikowska actually looks the right age for the part…. Joan Fontaine, Susannah York, Zelah Clarke and Charlotte Gainsbourg were all in their mid-to-late-20s, and just couldn’t pull off Jane’s youthful vulnerability…. Samantha Morton and Ruth Wilson were both close to Jane’s actual age, but even so, they both had such a precocious and authoritative screen presence that I felt they couldn’t pull off the “not a girl not yet a woman” schtick. Wasikowska can not only pass for a teenager physically, but she has the right delicate trepidation in her mannerisms to pull off Jane’s adolescent insecurity…. Amelia Clarkson is an equally arresting screen presence in the scenes featuring Jane as a child.



Michael Fassbender really creeped me out as Rochester. He brings just enough dark, brooding menace to the scenes depicting Rochester’s creepy stalkerish ways to instil a palpable sense of dread in the audience, whilst at the same time exuding enough smouldering animal magnetism that the audience can understand why an impressionable young girl like Jane would be drawn to him.



But the real standout for me was Jamie Bell in the role of St John Rivers. He totally stole the show. The character of Rivers is little more than a caricature in Bronte’s novel….. Bell humanises Rivers a great deal. In the film, Rivers comes across as a much more three dimensional figure than he is in the book, and at times I almost felt sorry for him… he’s still self righteous and arrogant, but Bell never lets the audience forget that there is also a compassionate facet to his religious zeal. Bell comes across more as a misguided idealist, rather than the complete monster that Rivers is often depicted as being. In this film, Rivers ultimately comes across as just as tragic and romantic a figure, in his own way, as Rochester.


I had a cinephile friend who once complained that every second period-film made in France seemed to have Gerard Depardieu in it…. it seems that British cinema has a similar law which states that every second period film made in England has to have Judi Dench in it somewhere, and waddaya know, she shows up in Jane Eyre…. much as I find her ubiquity a bit wearying at times, I must confess, the reason Dench so often shows up in films like this is that she tends to get the job done rather well… and she’s actually playing against type here… usually Dench plays rather cold, frosty characters, but she brings real warmth to the role of Rochester’s maternal housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax.

Also memorable is Freya Parks as Jane’s childhood BFF, Helen Burns… she only gets a few scenes but makes a lasting impression nonetheless, and one wishes there was more of her in the movie, as Amelia Clarkson’s chemistry with Freya Parks is just a little bit stronger than the chemistry between Wasikowska’s adult Jane and either Fassbender or Bell…

Which brings me to the main stumbling block of this film, the dialogue.

Moira Buffini’s sсript makes few concessions to modernity. In fact, at least 90% of the dialogue is ripped word for word from the pages of Bronte’s novel… and as if that wasn’t enough, Buffini inserts excerpts from Jane’s didactic internal monologues into the dialogue as well.

Now, much of Bronte’s dialogue is very witty, and it looks beautiful, indeed, almost poetic, on paper…. but once you put Bronte’s purple prose in the mouths of human beings and have them speak it out loud, it often comes across as stilted and oddly unnatural.

So often in this film, it feels as though the characters are taking turns to deliver speeches at each other, rather than engaging in a natural, human conversation… Bronte’s dialogue feels too ornate and out of synch with the normal rhythms of human speech, even for the time period.

Often the dialogue feels redundant in a cinematic context. So much of the underlying emotion of a given scene is bleedingly obvious just from a cursory glance at the actors’ faces, it feels like unneccessary overkill to have the characters make a long winded speech about something that’s so readily apparent.

Often the characters will say 12 words when 5 would’ve been more than sufficient… I remember one moment in the film where Rochester says to Jane “You transfix me quite” and nearly the whole cinema burst out laughing at how terribly literary and uncinematic the dialogue was.

I’ve read other reviews that complain that Wasikowska’s chemistry with Fassbender and Bell is too mannered – I disagree, I think it’s just Bronte’s dreaded purple prose that is holding them back…. there’s a scenic montage of Wasikowska and Fassbender out for a picnic, shortly after Rochester has proposed marriage to Jane, and they are out enjoying the fresh air and sunshine….. not a word is spoken between the two of them, but you can see how natural and at ease with each other they are….. there’s another scene in which Wasikowska is gazing at Fassbender from across a crowded room, not a word is spoken, but the repressed longing Jane feels is tangible…. the scene in which Jane and Rochester kiss for the first time, again, not a word is spoken but the sense of release and the giddy exhileration of the main characters lights up the screen….. the only times when Wasikowska’s chemistry with Fassbender seemed off was when they were forced to sit down and talk about their feelings, because Bronte’s dialogue comes across as speechifying, rather than a realistic two way conversation.

I feel that if Buffini had toned down Bronte’s purple prose, instead of doing a “copy/paste” job on the dialogue in the book, the film would flow a lot better….

It’s a pity, because in many other ways, Buffini makes some very smart decisions in adapting Bronte’s novel to the screen.

Again, I applaud the fact that Buffini made Rivers into a more complex, if not more sympathetic, character – instead of being just a symbol, Rivers is a credible human being in this film…. she also cuts down on the number of convenient coincidences that occur in the third act, so the denouement presented in the 2011 movie is somewhat more plausible than the overly neat way in which Bronte tied up all the loose ends of the narrative.

Probably the most controversial change Buffini makes to Jane Eyre is in terms of narrative structure – she begins the story at the end of the second act, and then the third act unfolds, intercut with flashbacks to scenes in the first and second act…..

I, for one, applaud this. For two reasons:

1. It adds a greater sense of mystery to the proceedings

2. It helps the audience further empathise with Rivers and it forges a closer connection between the Rivers character and the main plot, seeing as he finds out about Jane’s past along with the audience.

Now, I paid to see this film twice at the cinema, so obviously I enjoyed it, despite it’s various shortcomings. I detest “star ratings”, but if pressed, I would probably rate this 3.5 stars out of a possible 5 stars.

In the wider scheme of things, this is one of the better film versions of Jane Eyre out there, and it’s certainly one of the better films of 2011… it is a film I will no doubt return to when it comes out on DVD… and yet, just like every other version of Jane Eyre out there, including the original novel, one is left with the feeling that it’s just not all that it could be.