Period Drama: Storm in a Fine China Teacup

The period/costume drama has a long and prestigious tradition in almost every film-producing country in the world, but endless crinoline and Jane Austen adaptations seem always to place the UK as the premier source of such frequently self-satisfied “quality” entertainment.

Before the 90s rush of Austen films and mini-series, there was Merchant-Ivory. The success of their measured adaptations of James, Waugh, Forster and others seemed to set a standard for good manners and impeccable production design that proliferated through a rash of period films, albeit that many dispensed with the seething passions that bubble beneath the starched surfaces.

The tradition is as old as cinema. Early silents took Victorian melodrama straight from the stage, and immediately ransacked great writers like Dickens and Hardy. The danger, then as now, is that the film-makers become overly enamored of the formal manners and handsome trappings of the nineteenth century, and the sense of period becomes a suffocating albatross to extinguish real human emotion.

Perhaps there is a change afoot. News of Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” evokes a primal drama of the Moors that merely happens to take place 150-odd years ago, in which human characters and traits are recognizably our own, rather than the foreign eccentricities of a dimly-imagined past.

The staid nineteenth century has been undergoing a welcome facelift of late. “Wuthering Heights” continues the most recent trend of “Jane Eyre” and “Bright Star.” They in turn follow Michael Winterbottom’s Hardy adaptations in handling period as merely a backdrop to roiling human passions. Perfectly designed though they are, the sets and costumes are presented as habitation rather than dressing. “Bright Star” in particular does a splendid job of creating a living, present milieu, housed and dressed to comfortable perfection, and all bathed in natural yet gloriously romantic light.

Winterbottom’s “The Claim” tapped into that most versatile of costume/period dramas, the Western. The history of the Old West allows ample scope for (re)imagination, and little literature of the period has a generally classic status. The European nineteenth century has fewer guns and outlaws, but it has no fewer human passions; given the UK’s fondness for dressing up old-timey, it’s surprising how infrequently an original scenario turns up. Perhaps finally, however, the genre is beginning to emerge from the straitjacket of literary heritage to create its own wild past, in which settings and costume are perfected in order to provide a backdrop to the human story, rather than the other way round.

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