Wide Sargasso Sea
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DVD details
Actor: Karina Lombard, Martine Beswick, Michael York, Nathaniel Parker, Rachel WardDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 98 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-11-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video
DVD Reviews of Wide Sargasso Sea
DVD Review: I tried, but I really couldn't understand.
Summary: 3 Stars
For the record I've never read "Wide Sargasso Sea" although I've read "Jane Eyre" quite a few times. I've always figured Edward Rochester was a bad man. Every relationship he had with women before his involvement with Jane ended badly. With one lunatic wife and one dead mistress...Well...
I admit to feeling equal parts awe and disappointment with this film. It wasn't that the erotic excesses offended me; I just felt less attention to erotic love scenes and more attention to the rather heavy themes in story would have made things more interesting.
The movie is not consistent with Rochester's portrayal in Jane Eyre or his explanations of his marriage to Antoinette. The implication is that Antoinette was descended from lunatics and was also a notorious adulteress (there were even hints her insanity was the result of syphilis in "Jane Eyre"). Antoinette's brother in the novel, Richard Mason, is completely eliminated as a character.
In the movie, Antoinette is presented as a lonely orphan with no close family to cover up her alleged madness and "vices".
There are other inconsistencies that just stray too far from Rochester's explanations as well as Bronte's novel to keep a true Bronte fan engaged.
Antoinette and Amelie are two-dimensional characters, competing for the sexual favors of Antoinette's loser husband who doesn't particularly like or respect either one of them.
It looks like the brains behind the film could not decide whether Edward Rochester was a racist libertine or a victim of circumstance. The balance is tipped by saddistic behavior (i.e., killing animals and brutalizing his young wife.) He is basically a fortune-hunter who does not hesitate to despise his wife's cultural differences once he's acquired her wealth and properties.
I think the writers hoped to create a theme of Black/African female empowerment by having Amelie seduce Rochester, then accept a gift of money from him and walk out of his life to become a whore.
Also, it is never clear to me when/how Antoinette went mad. She does not strike me as mad or even unstable in the course of the film although she does portray classic alcoholism and depression after her husband's abandonment. Surely no one presumes she is psychopathic because she tried to club Rochester with with a glass bottle and spit in his face after he had loud noisy sex with Amelie just outside her bedroom!
Even the portrayal of Daniel Cosway is sort of weird. One minute he appears to be affectionate towards Antoinette (his half-sister) and the next he is bound and determined to do everything he possibly can to ruin her marriage and destroy any opportunity for her happiness.
The two actresses who portray Aunt Cora and Christophine deliver solid performances and Lombard does her best with her role and makes the most of her improbable lingerie (midriff-baring camisoles were not around in 1840.)
The film has lush beautiful scenes and an almost fantasy quality about it and costume quality is good except for inaccutate lingerie. I think it's best to watch and appreciate the film for what it is and not worry too much about accuracy with its actual novel or Jane Eyre. As an erotic romance gone bad it's a keeper.
Description of Wide Sargasso Sea
A prequel to "Jane Eyre." An Englishman in nineteenth-century Jamaica falls into a tortured marriage with a native Creole. When the woman begins to go mad, her husband takes her back to his gothic estate in England, where he locks her in the attic.Bestsellers in DVD
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