NA07 tonight for the Brits, and Alert Janeite Kathleen sent us scans of the Radio Times articles about the film. The main article seems to be establishing the meme that no doubt will be rammed down our throats: that NA isn’t that good anyway, so isn’t it lovely that Andrew Davies has fixed it?

Lustful brigands, rumpled beds, girls in their nighties tied to trees…it’s hardly Jane Austen as we know it, but ITV’s production of Northanger Abbey is the most enormous fun. Adapted for the screen by Andrew Davies, the script plays expertly with the Gothic fantasies underpinning Austen’s least-filmed–and possibly, least-loved–text.

There are just so many things wrong with that sentence that we are at a loss.

“All we’ve done is to make things easier for the 21st-century audience by showing on screen what’s going on in the character’s head,” says producer Keith Thompson.

Oh, gee, thanks! Because we’re really, really stupid!

“For Catherine, being plunged into Bath society is a bit like a schoolgirl these days going to Glastonbury or Ibiza–a place where all the proprieties are suspended for ‘the season,’” explains (Felicity) Jones.

Um, no. Sorry, sweetie, you’re very cute and all, but…no.

While JJ Feild stars as Catherine’s official love interest, the upright if enigmatic clergyman Henry Tilney

Henry Tilney is hardly enigmatic. He is amusing, charming, intelligent, well-educated, a good dancer, likes novels, and looks fab in a great coat. Anything else we can help you with?

…the show is somewhat stolen by William Beck as the oafish John Thorpe.

“There’s no two ways about it, my character is fairly ghastly, but I think you have to play against that. I don’t think anyone goes aobut in the world thinking, “I’m a s**t and I’m going to act like a s**t and it doesn’t ring true if you act it that way,” says Beck.

Hee. Very true!

Like last week for MP, Germaine Greer has written a column about the novel and, unlike everyone else, seems to actually have read the bally thing.

Catherine is fascinated by Henry Tilney’s ironic manner and in love with him from pretty much the first time she sees him, which is lucky because he’s just the sort of man she ought to be impressed by and in love with. In remaining unimpressed by John Thorpe, the brother of her new friend Isabella, she shows the correctness of her untutored judgment. In her instinctive response to the unprincipled behaviour of Isabella, Austen shows us the warmth of Catherine’s attachments and the soundness of her judgment.

We are the more shocked, then, when she begins to behave in an irrational manner. The reason is simple: she has been reading Gothic novels, in particular The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Nobody reads these now, but there are plenty of books in print that can affect our capacity for clear thinking and rational judgment just as disastrously.

[. . .]

What Austen shows in Northanger Abbey is just how easy it is to separate a young woman from her own good sense. Today’s popular culture pressures women to behave irrationally, to starve themselves, say, or get drunk and wasted, or spend money they haven’t got. Catherine’s popular culture tricks her into entertaining absurd suspicions about Henry’s father, General Tilney, and these delusions in turn mask from her General Tilney’s real defects of character.

Hear, hear!

Interestingly, the “review” of NA07 in the same publication is not quite gushing.

Jones makes a chirpy, if vaguely annoying heroine, but the whole thing lacks charm.

Yikes!

Ray Bennett gives the film a good review in The Hollywood Reporter.

Capturing vividly the flush and wonder of adolescence, the film mines Austen’s first-written but last-published novel

Um, no.

…to find purest nuggets of wit, romance and social satire. The story’s 18th-century heroine, Catherine Morland, has a fevered imagination and Davies draws on Austen’s droll illustrations of it to create scenes of gothic adventure.

This is Austen for those who imagine wrongly that her novels are dry and dainty. There’s lust and hunger in these characters and Davies, along with director Jon Jones (”A Very Social Secretary,” “Archangel”), gives them full rein while never betraying the social straightjackets of the time.

Lust and hunger, eh?

The progress of Catherine’s unhappiness from the events of the evening was as follows. It appeared first in a general dissatisfaction with every body about her, while she remained in the rooms, which speedily brought on considerable weariness and a violent desire to go home. This, on arriving in Pulteney-street, took the direction of extraordinary hunger, and when that was appeased, changed into an earnest longing to be in bed; such was the extreme point of her distress; for when there she immediately fell into a sound sleep which lasted nine hours, and from which she awoke perfectly revived, in excellent spirits, with fresh hopes and fresh schemes. - Northanger Abbey, Vol. I, Chap. IX

Lust and hunger, indeed.

Alert Janeite Rob Hardy reports that the Guardian also has a review of the film by Sarah Hughes, which he couldn’t find online.

The title of the review is “My Heart Belongs to Tilney.” The review calls Felicity Jones “perfect” as Catherine. After brief mention of Andrew Davies’ daydream scenes, the review concludes: “Ultimately, though, Northanger Abbey is a novel that celebrates reading and the pleasures of getting lost in a book as much as it does the first flush of love. This clever, spirited adaptation gets that absolutely right. Miss it if you dare.”

Incidentally, Alert Janeite Emma sent us a link to her local news program(me) on ITV, which had a feature about JJ Feild and Blake Ritson paying a visit to Chawton Cottage. Unfortunately, it’s only available to viewers in the UK. Click on the link, then Thames Valley–Evening Bulletins, then Thames Valley Tonight for Friday, March 23. Emma said, “To get on to part 2 of the programme you have to watch the first part of the programme, then watch some adverts (patiently!) then the 2nd part will come on and it is the first feature.”