Sense e Sensibility

 

Places, like people, are never quite what you expect them to be… 

Austen was writing in 1811 about a society in which a woman could see her fate radically altered depending on the man she married, the dowry available to her, and the inheritance she might or might not receive. The story of the Dashwoods already contains a fierce anatomy of male economic power: the death of a man can immediately transform the material circumstances of a family of women, while property follows the male line. 

It is anything but an outdated idea. 

Indeed, it may be the most contemporary material the novel contains. 

And yet this is precisely where the film’s contradiction emerges: potentially still effective material is treated without any genuine interpretive explosion. 

Oakley has stated that she did not want to make a work recognizably tied to 2026. Her intention was to create something detached from time, almost like an object that might be found on an old shelf without immediately revealing when it had been made. It is a legitimate choice. 

But detaching oneself from time does not necessarily mean being timeless. Because cinema is not a museum. 

And if, in 2026, we return to Sense and Sensibility, after Ang Lee’s 1995 film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet and the 2008 BBC miniseries, the inevitable question becomes: what does our present see that previous cinema had not yet seen? 

The answer is difficult to identify in this film. 

The narrative structure remains Austen’s. The characters remain Austen’s. The conflicts remain Austen’s. The resolution remains Austen’s. Even the dialectic between sense and sensibility is not genuinely reopened, but simply restated. 

And yet that dialectic is as old as Western reflection on the human condition. 

There is no need even to go as far as psychoanalysis. Greek tragedy has always known the conflict between desire, passion, law and measure. Plato transforms it into the image of the charioteer attempting to govern two divergent horses; Freud, many centuries later, reformulates it through the conflict between the Id, the Ego and the Superego. The vocabularies change, but the ancient question remains: how much of the human being should be surrendered to desire, and how much should be governed by reason? 

Austen, of course, is not simply illustrating this philosophical opposition. She places it within the social condition of women. 

And this is the most interesting part of the novel: Elinor and Marianne are not merely two temperaments. They are two different ways of surviving in a society that grants women very little room for self-determination. 

Elinor’s reason is also a survival strategy. 

Marianne’s sensibility is also a form of freedom. 

Both, however, pay a price. 

And this is where the film could have intervened. 

It could have asked what it means to be an Elinor today. What remains of the nineteenth-century Marianne. How much the relationship between love and economic dependence has changed. To what extent marriage has ceased to be — at least formally — a contract of survival, and to what extent certain social structures have simply become less visible. 

It could even have done the opposite: denied contemporaneity, transforming Austen into something grotesque, ferocious, comic, disturbing. 

It does not. 

The film chooses continuity. 

Formally, too, it opts for a more earthy naturalism: 35mm cinematography, natural light, deliberately less polished costumes, lived-in clothes far removed from the traditional iconography of bonnets and lace. Costume designer Grace Snell has explicitly spoken of the desire to move away from the “prim and pristine” aesthetic of the period drama and make the clothes feel more lived-in and organic. 

But changing the surface does not necessarily mean changing the gaze. 

And perhaps this is the point. 

You can dirty the clothes, tousle the hair, remove the bonnets, shoot in more natural light, make the countryside more physical and less postcard-like. You can even shift the aesthetic approach towards something rougher and more contemporary. Some critics have indeed emphasized precisely this naturalistic, earthy quality of the new version. But if beneath that new skin exactly the same film continues to run, the renewal remains cosmetic. 

Not because a new Sense and Sensibility necessarily has to be better or worse than the 1995 film, but because that film had a precise cinematic reason for existing: Emma Thompson transformed the screenplay into fully cinematic writing, blending irony, pain, repressed feelings and social observation. The new version therefore finds itself confronting a precedent that is not only popular, but already highly accomplished in interpretive terms. 

Oakley seems to want to avoid the comparison precisely by returning to the source; the result is an elegant, meticulous film, performed with commitment, but strangely devoid of necessity. 

And perhaps this is its most interesting contradiction: Sense and Sensibility is about people forced to reinvent their lives when the world they knew collapses. The film, by contrast, seems to have no need to reinvent itself. 

Austen had already said it all. 

Cinema should have found a way to say something Austen could not have said, simply because it belongs to our time. 

Not necessarily by changing the story. Not necessarily by modernizing it. But by finding an angle, a form, a cruelty, an irony, a madness, a distance. 

Something. 

Because a remake can be faithful to the text and, at the same time, unfaithful to the spirit of cinema. 

And here remains the most uncomfortable question: if the story is identical, the conflict is identical, the resolution is identical, and even the interpretive horizon remains essentially that of the novel, what makes a new version necessary? 

The answer might simply be that every generation wants to retell its classics. 

But then, along with the classic, it must also tell us something about itself. 

Otherwise, it is not a new reading. 

It is a repetition. 

Everything has already been said, but since no one listens, we must keep going back and starting all over again.
— André Gide