Miss Austen Regrets (2008)

This "film" reminded me very much of the many films and series based around Agatha Christie's works, in the sense that it's one of the many British period pieces that you *look at* rather than watch. The houses, the gardens, the clothes, the lovely crystallised manners are lovingly presented, every detail just right. Plot? Not so important--and in this case it's a good thing. True, Miss Austen wrote prolifically and well for the reason many authors do--because their own lives aren't like that. Re-writing (or redirecting) reality is what the movie and novel industries are all about; controlling events, making it happen the way you want it to happen, not the way it so often does in real life. And so often, the director and writers' personal agenda gets pride of place; they wanted to show Austen as an embittered woman who "lost out" because she rejected woman's traditional role of wife and mother. If that were not the case, there would have been less emphasis on the many (apocryphal) refused proposals and they wouldn't have chosen the title "Miss Austen Regrets." I think Jane certainly regretted being poor, and being unable to be the captain of her own fate to the degree she would have liked to, but that can be said of many people today, as well. Life is what it is, and you do what you can with what you have.I watched this film in company with my own gentleman admirer, and his reaction led me to come in to IMDb and look for more information. He said, "I get the feeling someone had rented the costumes and locations for yet another period piece, finished before the deadline, and told the director, "Go ahead and use our stuff to make your film, we've got a few days left on the sheet." I was amused when reading IMDb's "Trivia" section to discover that indeed many of the costumes, interiors (and of course the actors) have appeared in other Regency romance films. It's almost as much fun as playing "spot the blue motor" and counting how many times per episode Hastings exclaims "Good Lord!"when watching the Granada series of Poirot--but not quite.

In my opinion, the direction only brings out 25%-30% of miss Austin's real life where the rest is not justified for her of being the 'Best Cook' of the recipe of 'Love'. Definitely there should have been a point in her life that she regretted of not getting married, though It's not a factor for her struggle of bringing out romance in an era, where wealth became a factor. The way Jane Austin brought up 'Pride and prejudice', 'Sense and Sensibility', The persuasion' etc. give us a broader view on how a young woman should look for a partner apart from wealth. In her case, she was not in a situation but her effort on describing it was magnificent. Isolating her lengthy character, and by only focusing as a single movie apart from 'Becoming Jane', I think this is worth watch.

The Austen Industry ensures that almost every year there is a new production of either one of her books, or of films about how us moderns are affected by her work (The Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in Austen)almost two centuries after she lived. This film turns the spotlight away from her characters to the author herself, and does it wonderfully well: we see her as sister, daughter,and aunt, a creature of flesh and blood who is not beyond the occasional infatuation in middle age. Well cast, well acted and all that one expects from a satisfying period drama. For an hour and a half I was transported from monsoonal India to nineteenth century England -- what more can one ask for!

I have watched this movie because I love Jane Austen's books, and because I have seen "Becoming Jane", and because I have read a TLS review of it. But, somewhat to my surprise, it is not Austen's biographical details – true or false – that were my main attraction. The point is, the movie tells an important truth (apart from delivering a series of trite statements on men-women relationships, which are all trite because they are so true…) about life stories, or the ways people think – and talk – about their lives. They oscillate – at least Jane did, as many of us do – between regrets (in spite of the title, the movie is NOT about regrets) and the idea that one could have made a "better" decision, and the feeling that the decision was absolutely right ("I have won my freedom"), and yet another feeling, that there was no decision at all, just a coincidence, which (Freud would have said) expressed the true longings and desires, or (some other people would have said), ended up as it did ("things turn out for the best", the movie says). I would hate to think that people see that movie as "just about Jane Austen" – much as I admire her, it is about all of us, and importantly so...