‘Miss Austen’ on PBS wonderfully delivers the love and loss Jane Austen fans know by heart
...Because [Jane] Austen’s prose is so elegant and clear, her wit so sharp, her comedy so dry, her irony so delicious, her observations so acute, her heroines so indomitable, her novels have lived on for two centuries. They offer a vacation destination for the mind, a world in which to luxuriate. Rich in characterization, compelling in their plots, fascinating in [...]
As Jane Austen’s Sister, Keeley Hawes Keeps a Controlled Burn
Being cast in the mini-series “Miss Austen” began Keeley Hawes’s first venture into the Jane Austen-verse. Hawes has a résumé thick with period pieces but, perhaps surprisingly, she had never done a screen adaptation of Austen’s work — a veritable cottage industry in Britain since the late 1930s. “Of course, my husband played Mr. Darcy, so I feel like we’ve been in [...]
How ‘Miss Austen’ Draws Fine Art from an Act of Real-Life Cultural Vandalism
For many literary scholars, Cassandra Austen is a villainess of Miss Norris-esque proportions. After all, her deliberate burning of her sibling’s vast personal correspondence — only 160 of her approximately 3,000 letters are still intact — largely thwarted any attempt to further understand the famously elusive author. However, “Miss Austen,” itself based on Gill Hornby’s same-named piece of historical fiction, does its [...]
Sun, sex, and synthetic jellyfish: How the film adaptation of Deborah Levy’s sapphic drama Hot Milk was made
...Loosely then, Hot Milk integrates Lenkiewicz’s creative specialities: sapphic intimacy, deep-rooted generational trauma, and women’s struggle for freedom. Or, as she perceives it, “sexuality is so much about freedom,” while the question to ask about fractured family dynamics is when “you’ve got damage in the past, can you unravel that damage [or] are you just colliding and clashing against each other?” Filming [...]
Christine Langan explains how ‘Hot Milk’ became the first film from Bonnie Productions
Christine Langan is used to juggling sizeable teams and hectic slates, having been CEO of Steve Coogan’s UK outfit Baby Cow for four years and, prior to that, creative director at BBC Film for seven. At Bonnie Productions, which she set up in 2020, Langan is the sole employee. The first feature on her slate, Hot Milk, world premieres in [...]
Emma Mackey on Starring in ‘Haunting’ Mother-Daughter Drama ‘Hot Milk’
...But Mackey found herself seeking something different for her next project — which is where “Hot Milk” came in. “It felt very elegant, very female-led and it’s an independent film so there were all of these elements that fell into place,” she says. “It just felt really obvious to me that I should go for it.” Read full article on [...]