so I watched the 2007 version of persuasion (I'm still waiting on the 1995 version to arrive oops) and it was, as you said, okay. I am sad because 1 it didn't include the toddler scene and 2 it included the alternative version where he asks about her engagement to her face which I didn't like very much hmmm BUT her running around bath in a corset, while probably impossible (she seemed too tired to walk sometimes so? ) was hilarious because it was so impossible. and the Wentworth was cute? haha
To be quite honest the 1995 version also lacks the toddler scene AND has the face-to-face confrontation about the supposed engagement, though it plays with a different sort of tension and, to me, is more naturally cut up by Anne’s own agency and reactions to things, whereas the 2007 Anne just has successive visitors to the house in Camden Place flung in her face while she stands there stunned and unable to move until the Captain has left and then it’s this big deal of tracking him down. I don’t know if the running about Bath was supposed to be a sign of how strong her love is or how she’s kind of come back to herself and gained strength since being around Wentworth again, but that whole ending is kind of messy in my opinion. Mrs. Smith is supposed to be so ill she can’t walk so imagine my surprise when she comes conveniently darting up to divulge plot-twist information to Anne who is running around in the street like a madwoman without her bonnet or gloves.Usually I appreciate fresh takes but honestly they just abused the Go-Pro camera opportunities, there.But Rupert Penry-Jones is very yummy and I’m not at all sorry that he got to have some scenes with Harville to flesh out their friendship and his feelings. I’m still a LITTLE mad that they decided to make Harville aware of exactly who Anne Elliot is from the very beginning (that Look he gives Wentworth when they are introduced, like!) because it’s all wink-wink-nudge-nudge for five seconds but then you’ve destroyed the guileless conversation he has with Anne about men and women and love and regret, because he can no longer have that conversation with her–he knows too much, he would know exactly what she’s referring to, and that’s too awkward. He’d literally just step across the room at that point and drag Wentworth over and tell them to sort themselves the fuck out. Which could be GREAT but just isn’t how any of it goes down.
So that conversation is snipped out of context and pasted back into Anne’s talk with Benwick, which…is sweet, I guess, but also needlessly crams More into their conversation at a weird time in the narrative. The Anne of Lyme is still reeling from being around Wentworth again, and I don’t think would be entirely comfortable enough to have such a conversation in such close quarters with somebody she’s just met. When she has that talk with Harville near the end of the book, she is a calmer, more confident woman, who has had a chance to at least try and seriously make her peace with the notion of Louisa and Frederick marrying, (and by then has found out that Louisa isn’t going to marry Wentworth at all,) some distance from everything in Bath, and also flattered back into something like her old appealing self by Mr. Elliot’s attentions. She may well have had thoughts to herself about the nature of women and forgetting true love, but she wouldn’t have sprung those on Benwick, a man she had just met, at such a time, when she herself wasn’t in an emotionally strong-enough place to express herself so well on such a subject. Time, distance, a change of people, a developed acquaintance and trust, and personal growth are what enable her to speak to Harville of her deepest feelings and true thoughts on such a matter.
I understand having to trim and fudge things for adaptations, but I do not like that they moved that conversation up earlier in the narrative (it’s supposed to be overhearing THAT conversation which prompts Wentworth at last to reach out to her!) or that Harville was made an all-knowing confidante all along.
