slofstra

There's kind of Bollywood movie I like, and one I dislike. Guess where this one falls. The problem with the movie is that it telegraphs what my responses should be, and, those aren't my responses.

I'm supposed to believe that the male lead "Bunny" is just a bad boy, sowing his wild oats, who will be reformed by a good woman.

Sorry, the guy and his friends are ill mannered goofballs who don't know how to act around women.

And then I'm supposed to think that Naina, the lead young woman, needs to be reformed from being a studious medical student. Because as we are being trained to recognize, any young woman who aspires to be something in the world, needs to be less serious, and loosen up.

Bunny and Naina aren't such bad people. But in real life, a marriage of these two is going to end in divorce. The issue here is that I am supposed to accept that this industrious young woman will fall for an oaf, they will then fall in love, and live happily ever after.

The entire premise of such a movie, and there are a number along this line, insults the intelligence.

Young men should know how to act around young women, before they even meet. The ones that don't, often do not change; they stay as a man-child.

Another issue is the bad acting of Naina. She seems to glower through the entire first part of the movie.

I tried very hard to like the movie, given the cinematography is at a high standard, and there are some good song and dance numbers. But there's too many lines that make me cringe, and after an hour, I couldn't take any more.

This review is based on the first two episodes of the series. I very much enjoyed them, and am optimistic about where this can go. I'll get back to my reasons for optimism, but first let's get something out of the way. What I have seen bears no more resemblance to a writer's life in the mid 19th century than Gilligan's Island resembles the actual experience of a latter day shipwreck. By 1850, there were not general objections to women writing although there were limited opportunities. A good picture can be obtained from a paper available online, "Victorian Women Writers' Careers", ed. Linda H. Peterson. And it seems doubtful that Emily's father, Edward, despite being a stern and severe man, ever wrote that women should not be published. I haven't read Dickinson intimately, but descriptions of her family life and education are readily available online.

Based on even a cursory reading of Dickinson's life, coupled with extensive reading of and on Victorian writers, I think it is highly improbable that Edward Dickinson would have objected vehemently to the publication of her daughter's poems. As to why she wasn't recognized in lifetime, there is a range of reasons, but unrequited genius is not uncommon, not least of which is the difficulty of being recognized and published, period.

The fact is that with women and men confined to separate spheres of life, men generally having much more opportunity and liberty in theirs, women did not need to be constrained with vehemence and force, the barriers were broad, systemic and also generally approved by most women. The reaction and resistance offered by Emily's mother seems much more realistic. And the sneaking into Amherst College would be seen as an amusing adventure; not likely met with force. On top of which, Emily's actual education included teaching in secular topics, maybe even volcanoes.

So the resistance which Emily encountered is revisionist based on how most women today would react to the strictures of that era. The strictures acted much more insiduously and seductively on the women of that time.

But all that aside, I like the show. It's clear that it's not meant to be authentic in any way, other than dressing up in colourful costumes. (And who knows how authentic they even are.) Austin states the he is "psyched" to be going to Michigan, at a time when Sigmund Freud hadn't even been born.

The program makes no pretensions to be anything but a bit of silliness as far as biography or history is concerned. So, where lies its promise? The fact is that some women suffered terribly and were limited by the strictures of that era, while many women lived comfortably within them. Most women today would not stand for a week of a general loss of their liberty, although a substantial minority would have no problem with it, to be fair. The premise might be that Dickinson was ahead of her time in her thinking and did suffer. (Although it seems likely that because her family was wealthy, she had latitude to live a contemplative life and had considerable liberty to do as she wished.) I look forward to seeing where this goes.

... before it's all pulled out of the dumpster fire with a happily ever after ending. Normally, these things end just before she marries the other guy. This one goes a step beyond that, and still recovers. 3 hours of worse, and worse, and even worse and all neatly tied up in a bundle in the last 2 minutes. This one is just a little too contrived to be believable. And many of the characterizations based on class divide are implausibly extreme. An implausible degree of miscommunication drags things on for an extra hour of viewing. The overall effect is one of unmitigated dreariness.

It's saving grace is reasonably good performances, but the script is heavy handed and required a lighter touch.