Jane Austen's movie club gets crowded

The browsers Ecstacy

That sounds like a smart sound bite coming from a Bollywood actress, and then you realise Sonam Kapoor (unwittingly) ends up sounding more like her clueless Aisha character - because Jane Austen isn’t a Victorian novelist! It’s obvious that the movie takes its inspiration from Hollywood recycling Austen (Alicia Silverstone in Clueless and Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma) than from any original literary source. 

This reminds me of something director Rajiv Menon went out of his way to point out when he South-Indianised Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in Kandukondain, Kandukondain: that his inspiration was the book, not Emma Thompson’s movie adaptation.

As proof, he said, he had scenes in the movie that are only found in the book. Menon’s Kandukondain I think is the best Jane Austen Indian mash-up so far. If you haven’t seen it, or only dimly remember it, it’s worth discovering. 

Menon transplants the story of two sisters —one sensitive, the other tempestuous—so fully into a South Indian ethos, that it becomes his own story. In the acclaimed Hollywood adaptation of Austen’s witty, romantic classic by Emma Thompson and Ang Lee, Emma played the older, sensitive sister and Kate Winslet the impassioned younger sister. Here Aishwarya Rai plays the younger sister, Tabu the older. Their suitors are played by Mammootty, Ajit and Abbas. With a lovely soundtrack from AR Rahman, the film is an irresistible musical as well. 

Young, gorgeous and pampered sisters Sowmya (Tabu) and Meenakshi (Aishwarya ) want for nothing except the true love their hearts crave.

While Sowmya grudgingly places family responsibilities ahead of romance, Meenakshi yearns for a white knight who will come to her “just like a storm.” Three different coincidences bring the girls three very different suitors and a tempest of romantic complications. Manohar (Ajith), an aspiring filmmaker, falls for Sowmya but will wed her only after directing his first film.

Commando Major Bala (Mammootty) woos Meenakshi despite physical and emotional war wounds and competition from Srikanth (Abbas), a charismatic poetry-quoting businessman. 

But in a cruel interplay of destiny and betrayal, the family is stripped of their house and belongings and is forced to set out to the city to build a new life. Menon, a cinematographer turned director, makes films sparingly. He made Minsara Kanavu in 1997 and in 2000, Kandukondain. Since then he has not directed any films. Menon always gets everything right in a film: the script (which he works on carefully) casting, sets, the ‘look’ of the film, and of course, the acting, direction and music.

(An important aside to note is Menon’s refusal to dub the film in Hindi or English for wider distribution. He insisted the language remain Tamil because he wanted an audience to hear it in the original).

The film is rich in emotion and character. The plot is both moving and witty. The cinematography by Ravi K. Chandran is ravishing.

What is also worth checking out is Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, a movie I have always thought should have been subtitled: “An Anthropologist Among School Kids.”

Heckerling’s savvy, witty, astute, deft social observations of these teenagers are deadly accurate. The movie is an entertaining chunk of sociology which sympathetically records how these kids speak, what they think, their dress codes, secret adolescent rituals, mores and beliefs and their sinfully rich lifestyles.  

My favourite bit from the movie: Alicia (playing the airhead Cher) is riding with her smart  college–going cousin and his radical, feminist, arty  type girlfriend who has been pontificating:  “Like Hamlet says: To your own self be true.” And Cher from the backseat says: “Hamlet didn’t say that.” Arty Type turns around, dripping: “Excuse me but I think I know my Hamlet.” Cher: “Yeah? and I know my Mel Gibson and he never said that. That Polonius guy did.”         

There’s a burgeoning Jane Austen industry out there now. Becoming Jane, a movie about the one lone (and failed) romance in Jane’s life and how this led to her famous wit  and ironic style. The Jane Austen Book Club, a book and a movie about a book club group whose lives begin resembling the Austen novels they are reading.

And then there’s the unexpected success of Quirk Books’ Austen mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Mansfield Park and Mummies.  It seems none of us can get enough of Jane Austen.

The latest Austen reworking is Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector, another contemporary take on Sense and Sensibility. 

But as culture critic Laura Miller recently asked in Salon: “Ask not what zombies can do for Austen, but what she can do for the zombies”. She goes on to note: “…the vast majority of the Austen mash-ups involve injecting some action element from contemporary pop culture into Austen's stories in order to make the novels more interesting.

This seems to work for quite a few readers, but those of us who find Austen's books sufficiently interesting on their own are left to wonder when the favor will be returned. We’ve been shown what zombies and monsters and bare-knuckle brawlers can do for Jane -- when do we get to see what Jane can do for them?”