From Prada to Nada: making a case for working class Spanish-American culture?

Nora-Elinor (Camille Belle) and Mary-Marianne (Alexa Vega) in their aunt’s house in East L.A. (From Nada to Prada 2011)

One of many murals forming backdrop for movie: Mary walking by

Dear friends and readers,

A week ago I examined the tendency in recent films belonging to the emerging & ever increasing Austen canon to erase central themes and inferred conclusions in Austen’s books, focusing on the genre and characteristics of the most recent Emma film, the 2010 Aisha, arguably more a transposition into luxurious Indian terms of Amy Heckerling’s 1996 Clueless than Austen’s Emma: Aisha, or Emma through Clueless lenses?. I demonstrated the reversal of a theme particularly strong in Austen’s Emma, but important in all her books an indirect condemnation of a husband-hunt enforced on women as their best, indeed only “preservative from want,” with the implied corollary women who don’t marry are not made but actually inferior and useless. I also suggested that where Aisha was at its strongest was precisely in those places where it returned to Austen’s Emma for structure and motifs (the heroine’s evolving relationship with Mr Knightley, and her humiliation, however overdone the latter in the film), in these showing the directors probably studied the 2009 Emma (scripted by Sandy Welch) and possibly the studiedly ironic and faithful 1972 Emma (scripted by Denia Constanduros, directed by John Glenister)

Bruno-Brandon ((Wilmer Valderamma) rejected by Mary-Marianne talks with Nora-Elinor, also feeling lonely — in all the faithful S&S’s Elinor and Brandon have moments like this together

Tonight I want to look at the 2011 analogous adaptation of Sense and Sensibility into From Prada to Nada. Unlike Aisha which despite its failure at the box office has been the subject of two excellent academic analyses and a number of popular reviews, From Prada to Nada has not attracted full scale serious examination as yet (it is dealt with by Karen Gevirtz as one of the newer kinds), possibly because its context-nexus includes telenovela romantic comedy, unlike Indian cinema not much explored in Eurocentric Anglo-American film studies. Like Aisha, From Prada to Nada transparently imitates previous Austen films precisely where these films depart from Austen’s books, to the point where its plot-design, key moments and hinge-points are a melange of the filmic Austen canon. I list just a few

when the girls are ejected from their house, we are shown the collapse of a gigantic outdoor dollhouse — an imitation of the huge tree-place in the 1995 S&S

The goodbye scenes (waving from the great-house of those left-behind) recall all the S&S films as does the peculiarly odious Fanny-Olivia (April Bowlby, very strong in the part)

Nora is presented as a near spinster and preferring it — like Emma Thompson as Elinor

Clueless is there in the sequences of Mary-Marianne’s speed-driving, the importance of her wardrobe and Prada shoes and handbag (Aisha-Emma-Cher is also a speed demon in a car and clothes-horse of the latest expensive name fashions)

When Edward Ferris (Nicholas d’Agosto) comes to the Dominguez aunt’s house in East L.A., and Nora-Elinor opens the door it’s love at first sight for them — like the first encounter of Somyra-Elinor and Manhor-Edward in I Have Found It

Nora-Elinor weeps over her father’s case of letters and manly accessories — as does Elinor in the 2008 S&S

Bruno-Brandon is modeled on the melancholy-proud protective, semi-resentful Brandon type David Morrisey conveyed in the 2007 S&S; he similarly directly saves and protects her

When Mary-Marianne is confronted by Marco Antonio-Willoughby (Oliverio Gareli) with his upper class rich wife, she rushes off into the pouring rain, gets herself into a horrible car accident and lands in hospital — this combined the 1995 S&S and I have found It

Edward’s final proposal to Nora-Elinor is not only like Hugh Grant as Edward’s proposal to Elinor, the very words are lifted from Grant’s speech, his very intonations

The Anne Hall moment of abandoment beween Nora and Edward in the kitchn

There are effective allusions to other romantic comedies in the Anglo canon: a kitchen scene with Nora-Elinor jumping onto a kitchen sink and making aspiring gestures is closely reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (this is confirmed in the feature). Probably there are borrowing from hispanic films by Angel Garcia (a respected Spanish film director), but alas I can’t recognize them.

This is not to deny that From Prada to Nada nonetheless manages to become a unified film whose central purpose is (as the again the feature suggests) to present, make understandable and sympathetic Spanish-American culture as it has evolved in the US under impoverishing, marginalizing and stigmatizing circumstances. Austen’s first published novel’s story of a group of females ejected from a high vulnerable position to depend on the charity of relatives and live lives appropriate to a much lower poorer status has been appropriated to display the striking visible contrasts of wealth and poverty in Los Angeles (the girls move from the rich west suburbs to East inner city environs).

The problem here is the depiction of the lives and work of hispanic people in this part of town and the kinds of jobs they can get has been too softened. The film does not have the courage of its convictions. We are not sure the women sewing in the house are illegal immigrants. When Nora and Edward combine forces to threaten an exploitative employer of cleaning people, they win wit unreal ease. The screenplay producers, Gigi Pritzer and Linda McDonough are on record as meaning to make a joyous and fun (this seems to be how Austen films are seen commercially), commercial film (celebratory of Spanish people envisaged as centrally part of the audience) and they succeed in combining gaiety with very touching moments: two parties in the film correspond to two key party scenes in Austen’s book and three of the faithful S&S films, but they cannot at the same time (or at least do not) expose the real pain, hurt, lack of opportunity and fulfilment of latino people in the US. After all both our heroines end up doing very well by the end and their aunt thrives all along.

That there were problems and the film-makers were in conflict is admitted in the features. The film was given up on at least once, and took 6 years to complete. The producers began with one script-writer and switched to two others, revising the first script thoroughly, and then in the last go-round of filming, the film’s content changed again more thoroughly than usual.

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Camilla telling Nora she needs to learn to clean house too — a Spanish housewife lesson (Nora has nearly set the house on fire trying to scramble eggs)

I have not mentioned an analogy for Mrs Dashwood because there is none. This is not the first film to eliminate Margaret (the first 2 S&S films did), but it is the first to eliminate both the mother and Mrs Jennings. The girls’ long-dead mother’s sister, Carmina (Norma Reyna) takes them in and some of her overtly cheerful nature may remind the viewer who had read Austen’s book of Mrs Jennings, but this feels almost like a coincidence. Carmina never embarrasses the girls; she is far more tactful than Mary-Marianne; she shows some grief as she remembers her sister’s death (apparently from a car accident), but her note is one of industrious upbeat acceptance. As with Aisha, Bride and Prejudice, and the 1940 and recent (2003) Mormon Pride and Prejudice this film makes little room for any real deprivation, lasting depth of sorrow, or doubt about the way life today is lived, families treat their members, and human nature is not seriously flawed — except in the case of the cardboard villains. As with I Have Found it, the John Dashwood character, here an illegitimate son, Gabriel Dominguez (Pablo Cruz) is pressured into bad behavior by his greedy snobbish wife: in the Indian film, the man dies; in this one he separates himself from his unworthy wife. We also lose the viciously materialistic Mrs Ferrars, Sir John and Lady Middleton, their children, Mr and Mrs Palmer. Lucy Steele survives as Olivia-Fanny’s sycophantic friend who Edward briefly engages himself to (and easily breaks off from), but her important contrasting sister, the foolishly vulnerable, needy Nancy Steele has been cut.

The effect of the cutting in Aisha was to eliminate all reference to risk of poverty, to unmarried women. Here disquiet, unease, discord, irreconcilable conflicts. There is no need daily, hourly, continually and forever to endure or struggle in the latest entries into the Austen film canon (as there is in all her novels) any more.

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Mary-Marianne’s serious flaw seems to be she shops too much

We were intended to see her first behaving sluttishly (the word slut is used) which seems a travesty of Austen’s critique of Marianne’s penchant for passionate idealism

It’s in this area of real human emotions and thought and problems that this film’s erasure of a central theme of S&S, one found across Austen’s oeuvre occurs. Austen’s opposition of two girls where both experience acute feelings, sensibility, but one (Elinor) is able to control this for her protection, self-respect and safety as well as peace, and the other (Marianne) rejects this kind of control and conformity as hypocritical and getting in the way of living a genuinely authentic existence; Austen’s Marianne regards ardor, idealism, willed enthusiasm, openness, sincerity as noble.

The film presents the central contrast between Nora-Elinor and Mary-Marianne as a matter of goals: Nora wants a career as a lawyer, and is presented as a reading, studying girl (signalled by her wearing glasses most of the time); she seeks a job (like Somyra-Elinor in I Have Found It); she says that she fears sexual entanglement because this will get in the way of her 10 year plan. As the film shows, Nora really fears emotional vulnerability but not because she is not sure her feelings are reciprocated. From the get-go Edward clearly loves her. In contrast, Mary rejects Bruno-Brandon as a poor working class Spaniard not worthy respect, a mannerless man beneath her notice, a servant-type. She goes for Marco Antonio-Willoughby because he is a college lecturer, seems rich, glamorous.

Mary dazzled by Marco Antonio taking her to a stylish lunch and talking fashionably

When Nora tells Mary she hardly knows him in their quarrel scenes, Mary replies he will be able to provide her with what she wants materially. Mary says she does not want to have to work for a living because it’s unpleasant and stressful (one cannot disagree I suppose). She reads a Lorca play (House of Bernardo Alba) to please Marco Antonio as he is presented as a guest lecturer, but shows no comprehension of its presentation of the repression of women’s passionate sexuality (which might have had some connection to Austen). Mary goes to bed with Marco Antonio the first chance she gets, and in a clashing quarrel that ensues between the sisters then, Nora calls Mary a whore.

The scene where Nora and Mary clash strongly

It may be that this kind of conflict is part of contemporary Spanish films: shall you give in to man and enjoy your sexuality freely by way of attaching a wealthy presentable male to you. If so, the question is not resolved, since the plot-design remains to some extent Austen’s and in order to be like Sense and Sensibility, Mary must see that Bruno-Brandon is much better husband material, actually the finer man and end up with him, and she does. In the film he is always honest with her, he fixes her car, he is responsible for making the aunt’s house adequate for her party; he is there for her at the party genuinely wanting to dance with her (not just going along with what she wants as the casual Marco Antonio does) and there for her when she gets out of hospital, all forgiving, all giving. There is no sense of them as the truly congenial pair, though maybe like Darcy and Elizabeth the idea is they are attracted by their very initial antagonisms:

Upon their first encounter, Mary tells Bruno she doesn’t tip, and he replies, that’s good because he doesn’t take IOUs.

We don’t know why she’d want to him as her partner because clearly he would not keep her in high fashion. She really goes for him because he’s there, and its time for the film to come to an end.

Mary attempting to improve her relationship with Bruno

Within a minute and one kiss or so, Bruno wheeling Mary over to where he has been showing children how to paint murals

One real flaw in this film is it’s not long enough: 107 minutes forces them to skirt (whiz past) episodes and foreshorten the denouement. Edward and Nora take less than 5 minutes to get back together again, and like the 1995 S&S all ends in a wedding (Nora’s), with Bruno and Mary seen dancing gaily together as the camera man snaps stills that turn into into black-and-white shot-photos fit for a wedding album.

More to the point, Nora and Mary are not Spanish enough. They are not truly subaltern women. Nora cannot speak Spanish and Mary identifies with upper class American culture. To use them as cynosures for young Spanish women could be taken as more than an easy-out, it’s a meretricious substitute. The women on the bus that Nora helps are genuinely hispanic women but they are presented as simpletons. The Spanish women in the aunt’s house act clownishly to make comedy.

Amid the modernizing changes, cultural transposition, time and budget constraints of From Prada to Nada a fundamental mentality of Austen is lost from view, and I think like Austen’s serious critique of family life and demonstration of the shallowness and dysfunctionality of friendship, her defense of not marrying, and braving poverty rather than selling one’s soul and body for one’s keep and social acceptance, her perception of human nature is not wanted. Austen objects to a blindness to the prosaic realities of existence; she prizes ardor, warmth, sincerity, but we must curb them or we will be taken advantage of or find ourselves living in delusions — as Emma does. I think some of this is found in the all the S&S films until this one, in the 1972 and Andrew Davies’s 1996 Emma, in two earlier analogous adaptations, Stillman’s Metropolitan and Victor Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise.

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Towards the close of the film Edward trying to get up the courage to propose to Nora

The wedded pair

It may be argued that Austen’s original structure where Elinor is the basic consciousness of the novel re-asserts itself in this film in the form of Nora providing the norms of behavior we are to approve her, and her wedding and securing of an individual lawyer’s practice (on Edward’s money and connections) its climax.

I don’t mean to be too solemn or break a butterfly on a wheel here. The film is intendedly light — where Austen Sense and Sensibility is not — nor are her other books, though it is true that commercial presentation of her in films does make her into light romantic entertainment, more than slightly unreal.

Talking in bed — again a scene found in all the S&S movies

As with Aisha, by the time the film came to an end I had become involved and enjoyed much in it. It has genuinely moving moments. It’s filled with familiar Spanish songs and refrains, filmed on location in Monterey, Mexico and parts of West L.A., and large murals painted by young Spanish artists are central to the mise-en-scene. Its strength is in the two sisters’ relationship and their evolving changes with their decreasing circumstances — which is the fundamental basis for all the S&S films.

Here Mary does not just dress Nora but has persuaded her to go the party where Mary is snubbed

Throughout the film we follow one and then the other in their contrasting as well as parallel adventures, with them we go through their crises; these trajectories are punctuated (as it were) by scenes of them talking, dreaming, dressing one another, arguing and supporting one another, quarreling and making up together.

The confiding scene of mutual shared grief found in all the S&S films is here done mutedly, and more effective for that

At the same time they have the triangular heterosexual relationships, Nora with Edward and (although too briefly) Bruno as confidant, and Mary keeping Bruno at a distance until she is betrayed by Marco Antonio. These relationships are presented with great delicacy of feeling and comic wit, and we feel relieved for the girls when at the close of the film they seem to be on their way to stable and secure happiness.

It’s a matter of subjective judgement here, but my sense is this film attempts to hold onto its connection with S&S by keeping the sisters’ relationship so solidly to the fore structurally, dramatically, emotionally (as Aisha maintains its connection with Emma through making Aisha and Arjun-Mr Knightley central). And after all women’s relationships with one another, not just sisters, is central to Austen’s desired vision of women’s lives.

Ellen

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Aisha or Emma through Clueless lenses?

Shefali (Amrita Puri as mostly Harriet/Tai, with glimpses of Jane Fairfax), Aisha (Sonam Kapoor as Emma/Cher), and Pinky (Ira Dubey as Dionne)

Dear friends and readers,

This film adaptation blog differs from most I’ve written in the last few years. It’s not so much an analysis of a film but in terms of its eponymous source and author, I discuss what’s left out. In the case of the Austen films which have come to form a sub-species of film (like Shakespeare adaptations), the more recent films seem to go much further from their originating text or novel matter and are intertextual with the other films in the ambiguously defined canon. They do more than appropriate their matter to contemporary and cultural and auteur purposes; what troubles me about the Austen canon is the recent films seem determined to erase central aspects of the originating author’s outlook and in so doing lose some of the value or uses the material can offer to their particular imagined audiences, in Austen’s case, women.

From a long scene where Emma (Doran Goodwin) domineering over a scared sitting Debbie Bowen (Harriet): she’s cool and scary with her scissors as Harriet holds up Mr Martin’s letter

As the canon grows ever larger, permutating this way and that, it seems worth while to look at what’s deliberately omitted across the movies no matter which novel their source, and how when something is left it’s skewed. I’m thinking of elements like the Austen films’ ability to have a female narrator, so uncommon in all films: in Sandy Welch’s (a woman script-writer) 2009 Emma, our narrator is Mr Knightley. Or how the genre to which most commercially-driven Austen films, specifically those meant for movie-house and not TV (and not the limited audience of PBS), have been since the 1940 Pride and Prejudice screwball comedies, while the BBC and US PBS mini-series (funded by companies who want to look civic-minded) have been women’s dramatic romances, soap opera if we want to use the denigrating term (epitomized best in the 1979 Fay Weldon P&P, a striking contrast to its immediate predecessor, the 1940 film); yet recently these types are re-worked to lose some of the fundamental elements of these genres. Screwball comedies had strong females who prevailed — remember Claudette Colbert, Greer Garson as Elizabeth trumping a shy Laurence Olivier as Darcy. In Aisha, a screwball comedy Aisha is scolded fiercely not just three times, but made to get up in front of a crowd of people she doesn’t know and bare her soul, at which she encounters derision. Where are the family pathologies (the 1972 Doran Goodwin as Emma was frigid, scathing, frustrated), the fallen women (Lydia in P&P is supposed ruined, sexually promiscuous, not the victim of male abuse as is implied in the 2005 Joe Wright P&P), they become gothic Jane Eyre like. Charlotte Bronte was right yet the alienated person, bitter, is now eager to conform.

So what is happening across the canon and to individual variations of a particular book. Here we look mostly at Emmas, especially as found in Aisha.

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Last week I added to my repertoire of Austen films for the first time in two years: I watched two recent free or analogous adaptations which in the 21st century way since the 2004 Gurinder Chadha Bollywood Bride and Prejudice uses Austen’s story to examine, critique or simply display another and non-Anglo culture: 2011 From Prada to Nada (Angel Gracia, Fina Torres), where the Sense and Sensibility matter becomes a sometimes seriously delving depiction of class and ethnic clashes between poorer Hispanic and upper middle American white culture in Los Angeles; and 2010 Aisha, both the 1996 Emmas (Andrew Davies, Douglas McGrath, respectively) and 1995 Amy Heckerling Clueless matter (with some memories of both Helen Fielding/Andrew Davies Bridget Jones movies) become a celebratory depiction of hugely rich Indian life in Delhi, with an excursion into Bombay/Mumbai and an expensive resort in the Himalayan mountains, Rishikesh.

As Linda Troost says in an excellent concise review these two films are part of what is an evolving Austen canon, where increasingly appropriation of Austen for purposes often quite different than Austen’s preoccupations is the prevailing aim. Not all of them do this. For example, Walt Stillman’s 1990 Metropolitan and 1998 Last Days of Disco (Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility with Emma respectively) and Victor Nunez’s 1993 Ruby in Paradise; (Northanger Abbey) seriously delve Austen’s own values and show their relevance or loss in our era. The central point of the 2009 Lost in Austen (Dan Zeff and Guy Andrews, mostly a re-worked Pride and Prejudice) is to ask why many readers of Austen want to retreat from their modern worlds and expose some delusions about the Austenland as imagined by many readers of the novels.

It is though, true to say, that both Aisha and From Prada to Nada as well as a couple of the transposition or faithful adaptations of recent years (the 2005 Joe Wright Lawrentian Pride and Prejudice; a 2007 anti-Mansfield Park Mansfield Park by Maggie Wadey) have a strong tendency to or deliberately wipe out or contradict central perspectives found in Austen. Troost and Sayre Greenberg have shown that many of the Austen films (faithful, commentary, analogous) reverse Austen’s jaundiced view of social life and exposure of painful family pathologies to be films which endorse the view that individual characters’ troubles come not from their immersion in a particular family (which is supportive, not adversarial) but larger unjust social and economic arrangements or other people outside the small band of good people they can turn to. There are some exceptions or this: the 1971 Denis Constanduros and 1981 Alexander Baron Sense and Sensibility (the latter said to be “very dark” and 1995 Nick Der and 2007 Simon Burke and Adrian Shergold Persuasions (the latter condemned as “neurotic”) come to mind.

From Prada to Nada and Aisha both eliminated, Aisha reversed central specific perspectives in their respective books in troubling ways that simply mirror the erasure of important problems in life for women today as much as in Austen’s time. One question one could ask of these two and those Troost cites is: as the Austen films move increasingly away from Austen’s books and instead mirror and interact with one another (or Austen sequels), how far can they leave Austen behind, even reject her and still be approached as derived from Austen? The film-makers say they appropriate Austen because she permits them to deal centrally with women’s issues, to have female protagonists and narrators central to the stories. So a second question comes when we see that the perspectives omitted are precisely those that mislead and distort women’s characters and lives.

Teresa Kenney has written a comprehensive analysis of Aisha
Aisha, Rajshree Ojha’s Urban Emma: Not Entirely Clueless, Persuasions On-Line, 32:1 (2011) so I can refer my reader to Kenney for plot-design, characters, and close-reading evaluation. I want to point out that in this depiction of the “posh” 1% of relaxed great wealth serious themes common to better Indian films as well as (separately) Austen ones have been erased. I had read that Aisha was a commercial flop when it first came out (wikipedia); certainly it lasted but one weekend in the movie-houses of the DC area. Nothing of most levels of Indian life, of the diaspora, of economic and social conflicts between traditional and modern, country and large city, of colonialism is to be found here. I liked how the songs and dances were integrated into the story and did not mind that but one was traditional, all the others being forms of contemporary global rock. But as a character says in I Have Found It, the Indian audience comes to see its distinctive movies because they want their characteristics there — to compel their passionate enjoyment and interest.

The complete absence of Miss Bates, near absence of Jane Fairfax, and sympathy for the nearly destitute and genteely impoverished we find in Emma is our clue (we are not clueless in Aisha) for what’s disturbingly missing from Aisha. I’ve been persuaded by a close-study of Jane Austen’s novels in the context of her life and letters by Pierre Joubert (JA: Etude Psychologique de la Romanciere) who has translated several of her novels. Joubert demonstrates that while we find in Jane Austen the idea of the necessity of marriage before the couples have met, and know before the characters that the marriage with a specific one is the best thing that can happen for our hero and heroine, the obsession derives from a fear on the part of the heroines (clearly seen in the books) of impoverishment. In all her novels we are led to see there is something deeply awry when a woman marries a man no matter what his nature, without regard for his nature.

Joubert argues that Jane Austen seems to call on her heroines to be willing to accept spinsterhood out of strong pride and self-hood rather marry anyone. What we find in the novels is non-marriage, self dependence freely and proudly accepted however desolating. An indirect condemnation of the husband-hunt from the get-go is central to understanding them, even the late semi-finished book, Persuasion or the one begun so early with the naive non-desperate Catherine. She gives us heroines who won’t quite be beggared or homeless but dependents on indifferently cruel or hard families. This angle of vision permits us to see how money is so important. A striking statement made early in The Three Sisters (a juvenilia) is “I had rather work for my bread than marry him”. (I dealt with this under the aspect of importance of affection and companionship in Austen in my blog on Austen’s poetry for Austen’s birthday).

The novels which gives us the most wrenching sense of this are Mansfield Park and Emma: Fanny withstanding castigation for not agreeing to marry Henry Crawford on the grounds he would make her miserable and she is not fit for him (we know he’d be bored as soon as his triumph was complete) is not our concern here, but a quartet of Harriet (desperately orphaned), Jane Fairfax (not far from it) Miss Bates (with no income once her mother dies) and Mrs Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was). Clueless kept Miss Taylor in Cher’s English teacher but it romanticized her and too re-constructed Harriet, marginalized Jane and eliminated Miss Bates.

An independent spinster English teacher (Twink Caplan as Ms Geist) with the kindly shy bachelor history teacher (Wallace Shawm as Mr Hall) — they survive into super-rich complacent aunt-uncle marrying as Aisha opens

I suggest with Joubert that Austen makes us feel the manner in which she feels her fate (in her letters and as implied author), tries to counter the notion of inferiority of women not married. He is puzzled by the “fierce outrage” as he calls this that accompanies this in the depiction of Charlotte Lucas’s marriage. I’d say it’s worse in the letters and in the way the unmarried heroines are now and again treated by other characters when it comes to regarding their marital possibilities. Mr Collins thinks Elizabeth Bennet a worst case scenario. Mary Musgrove casually humiliates her sister, Anne, continually. I’ve suggested in my blogs over the past year that Austen had lesbian impulses which went unassuaged, and the one man she passionately loved was verboten for her (Frank), a paradigm we see carried across the novels, which close readers from Isabelle Montolieu (her first translator) said gave her novels their power. We don’t have sentimental romance only hungry longing against something the heroine can not have, and then unexpectedly at the close the desired object is snatched against fate.

(My translation studies and reading what good translators have to say about Austen’s texts have given me new insights into Austen.)

The indirectly voiced cry that a woman who does not marry is not inferior and its grounding in the danger of destitution is lost from view. There is once early on in the film where Aisha voices her indifference towards marriage (showing the scriptwriter knows Austen probably), but all Aisha worked for in the film is to marry her friends to the people she considers “right” for them, and their quarrel with her is she is turning them to a wrong man, not (never) that they don’t want or need one.

But not lost is the single relationship that the heroine wants. In Aisha there is nothing forbidden about it — incest is hinted at in Austen’s Emma, brought out in the father-daughter paradigm of Knightley-Emma in Davies’s 1996 Emma, but once Emma awakens to her suddenly magical right all obstacles fall away. (A fairy tale.) The two times this relationship as a core of Austen’s novel has been done justice to on film have been the 1972 BBC Emma by Denis Constanduros and John Glenister (in this case as important as the script-writer) and the 2009 Emma by Sandy Welch. Both of these either dramatize the book carefully (1972) or re-arrange it (2007, with Mr Knightley becoming narrator at times) so as to make its backbones a series of long continuous scenes of the evolving relationship of Mr Knightley and Emma. In 1972 much is invented to add to Miss Bates’s presence; 2008 adds to this some scenes for Jane not dramatized in the novel at all.

John Carson as Mr Knightley (1972 with his rounded face)

Well here Aisha does follow suit. Aisha‘s great strength is it has profited from many of the previous films beyond Clueless. Troost and Kenney point to some of these. Well from beginning to end we have Arjun Burman (Abhay Deol even resembles John Carson, though doubtless this is coincidence) and Aisha meeting, talking, walking, conversing, arguing, debating. As they squared off in the kitchen and then laughed, they reminded me of Goodwin and Carson squaring off over cards and then laughing. Unlike the 2009 Emma the latest Indian couple does not fiercely quarrel most of the time but like the 1972 film and Austen’s book are shown to be fundamentally on the same wave length, at times guessing one another’s thoughts, capable of instant cooperation, deeply congenial even if Aisha does not want to see this.

Close-ups of Arjun and Aisha at club dance

Some of the additions from other films are directed towards strengthening Arjun as Mr Knightley’s impact on Aisha. For example, Devika Bhagat includes Arjun challenging the super-handsome stud Druv Singh (Dhruv Singh as the Frank character) on what are his intentions in the way Andrew Davies has David Morrisey as the intensely melancholy Brandon challenge Dominic Cooper as the sneering cad Willoughby. In Aisha the result is a fist fight in the bar. Austen’s plot-design has been wholly re-arranged to allow for these moments together and sequences. The very sexy dance at a club where Aisha starts out dancing with Druv and Arjun with his secretary-friend of whom Aisha is intensely jealous (a borrowed character from Bridget Jones’s Diary) ends up at last with Aisha and Arjun dancing with great erotic intensity, close to one another intertwining bodies and hands in the way of Jonny Lee Miller and Romola Garai in 2009 (and earlier Sylvestra Le Touzel and Nicholas Farrell as Fanny and Edmund in the 1983 Mansfield Park)

Parallel from 2009 (Emma; Aisha just a year later)

As Kenney notes the second half of Aisha begins to pile up hingepoints and parallels with Emma, with the Clueless triple friendship and condescending patronage of Harriet-Shefali-Tai over. Perhaps having both of Aisha’s friends, Pinky and then Shefali accuse Aisha of snobbery, indifference to them for real, utter egoism, after all Arjun’s reprobations begins to feel like overkill, but these are there perhaps to compensate for the absence of the humiliation of Miss Bates. There are no notes of tragedy or near-tragedy in Aisha; there are in Austen and in a number of the finer Austen films in the growing canon.

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Shefali: it’s she who almost drowns, with Arjun saving her; she’s arguable the real heroine of the movie, she stands up for herself, and instead of trying to get back at Aisha, gives her some perceptive advice

To conclude, it’s telling that the notes that are picked up from the McGrath 1996 Emma are Gwyneth Paltrow’s ever so kind love of animals. Paltrow is seen caring for them, with a reluctant Toni collette as Harriet in tow; Aisha has taken on animals as a cause for social work, boring the hell out of Pinky and puzzling Shefali (consistently made very appealing in the film). The least used of the Emma films is Davies’s mini-series with the astringent Kate Beckinsale and the sexually troubled and aggressive Mark Strong as her seething edgy Mr Knightley and a disquieting Olivia Wiliams as Jane abject before her half-gleeful Raymond Coulthard as Frank. He makes no excuses for himself while the Druv in Aisha blames Aisha for his “wrong flirting”.

Ellen

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