Wide Sargasso Sea

Released the same year as Jane Campion's The Piano with which it shares certain thematic similarities there is much costume but little drama in this pretty but bland adaptation of novelist Jean Rhys's prequel to Charlotte Brontë's classic 1847 novel 'Jane Eyre'.

To this point Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of fortune-hunter Edward Rochester (Nathaniel Parker) and his young bride-by-arranged marriage, Antoinette Cosway (Karina Lombard), heiress to land holdings in Jamaica and proceeds to explain the latter's descent into familial madness, something which was missing from Brontë's novel.

Australian director John Duigan and his cinematographer Geoff Burton deliver the conventional requirements of a period romance with lush visuals, photogenic stars and lots of soft-focussed eroticism in what is more of a Mills and Boon-ish fantasy than the English Gothic tragedy it should have been. 

 

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