Hallmark Does Jane Austen

Way back in February, the Hallmark Channel premiered several Jane Austen themed movies as part of its “Loveuary” (gag) ultra-romance heavy month, for a network that’s already loaded with cheezoid romance stories. Alas, these flicks were too late for Snark Week, plus I was in Venice for Carnevale when they aired, so I couldn’t watch or review them in realtime. But because I love you (and hate myself!), I recorded some of them and tracked down another on-demand, and thus April Fools Day seems like the right time to recap their ridiculousness.

Let’s go in order of most fully Jane Austeny to least, beginning with a fairly straightforward adaptation: Sense and Sensibility (2024). The update here is that most of the main characters are played by Black actors, although the story isn’t changed in any way to mention race. There’s one ever-so-slightly pointed line about Mr. Dashwood’s second wife and daughter (who are all Black) being treated as ‘second class’ in comparison to his (white) son from his first wife. Otherwise, it’s more color-blind casting than Bridgerton (2020-), where at least that Regency world acknowledges some difficulties the Black characters have had integrating into the white upper-crust society.

The performances are uneven — luckily Deborah Ayorinde as Elinor is strong, since she carries a lot of the movie, and Bethany Antonia is a decent Marianne. The men are the weakest, with Dan Jeannotte literally doing a Hugh Grant impression as Edward, Victor Hugo as a sadly un-dashing Willoughby, and Akil Largie is just kind of there as Colonel Brandon. The funny characters like the Middletons and Steeles are pretty good, which keeps things moving along as needed.

But, being a Frock Flicker, my eyes were always distracted by the clunkiest of clunker costumes. I can only be as the gods made me! Most every outfit is over-designed and under-fitted. This is a real pity because the costumes drag down what would otherwise be a bearable flick. The movie was filmed in lovely historical settings in Ireland and Bulgaria, and effort was made to create new costumes by designer Kara Saun. But IMO they should have stuck to rentals which could have been more historically accurate and better made and fitted for the actors.

In an Assignment X interview, Saun said her international team of four made 68 pieces in 20 days, which sounds like a stretch to me. She also said:

“For the ball, I wanted everybody to have a custom ball gown. I didn’t want any rentals. There were certain pivotal scenes, like the first arrival of John and Fanny to Norland Park, I wanted it to be all the Dashwood women standing out there, and you really saw who they were.”

Sure, fine, show who the characters are, but does that mean they’re women with terrible taste in fabric and slightly oversized clothes? Margaret’s pink embroidered pelisse coat is recycled from Sanditon (2019-23), of all things, and it looks OK. But her sisters are going Bridgerton-lite here, and this is just the start.

In the same interview, Kara Saun talked about using a lot of color in these costumes:

“These colors did exist in the Regency era. You may not see it all the time in the Regency-era films, but they’re very a part of the Regency era, and it was just us bringing it to light. There was this mint color. There was this raspberry color. Just think of anything in the color of a flower that you can make into a fabric.”

As I pointed out in my first review of Bridgerton, colorful gowns are historically accurate to the 1800s to 1820s. I hate the same-old little white Regency dresses!

But Bridgerton also reserved the wackiest color combos for the tacky, social-climbing Featherington characters to show how they were out of step with proper society. Characters like Lady Danbury and (in season 2) the Sharmas wear rich jewel tones, usually in a monochromatic fashion, because they’re all relatively in step with society. This tracks with period examples of colorful gowns and pelisses that are all in one or two colors with maybe a small pattern.

This is way too much:

For comparison, here’s an extant velvet spencer that has self trim and lace, and I’d bet money it was worn with a white gown:

Ironically, costume designer Kara Saun was the runner-up on season one of Project Runway, which I found out after watching this movie, while all through I’d been thinking of Nina Garcia “questioning her taste level.”

If the color combos aren’t bad enough, the ridiculous level of detailing layered with clunky trims stands out like WHOA. In Assignment X, Saun said clothes of this period:

“were always really detailed and decorated, and if you look at all of the costumes here, you’ll see my little details. I love detailing anyway, so the fact that I could detail them in Sense and Sensibility was amazing. You can see all the trim, the ribbon — for me, it was another dream come true. Nothing is just by chance, whether it’s the character, the fashion story, the script — every piece that you see, every silhouette, there’s really a reason for it, a reason for being, and I hope you can see those little fashion stories throughout the film.”

Yes, Regency clothing could have details, but dial it back, lady! You went overboard here:

This is the most exuberantly trimmed outfit I could find for comparison, and it’s still just one type/color of trim:

Likewise, fashion plates show outfits with lots of trim, but they’re in one contrasting color, at most:

Scale matters, folks!

Here’s a typical style of embroidery for a Regency gown (not to mention a typical bib-front closure):

In this Sense and Sensibility, some things are just poorly fitted, and a lot of things are fitted inaccurately for the period. The latter is a nitpick, true, but it makes the costumes look more modern, so I have to point it out. Many of the women’s dresses appear to be made with modern princess seams, which weren’t used in the 1800s-1810s. With the mostly round necklines these dresses have, it adds to the modern look.

Regency necklines could be rounded, but the bodice was shaped with gathers.

The period construction lines are easier to see on this striped extant example:

I can say that the hairstyling was lovely in this movie! Ladies’ hair was always properly up and well-done, plus hats were worn outdoors. Hair designer Kim Kimble said in the Laughing Place that she worked with the film’s historical consultant:

“There were no relaxers, there wasn’t a lot of pressing combs, there weren’t some of the modern techniques that we have now for styling. But I wanted it to look beautiful and styled, and incorporate things like braids, and texture into the hair. We’ve made some of our own accessories to add in there to make it colorful, romantic, and beautiful.”

But of course there’s some Battenburg lace, you know it, even with an otherwise decent dress on Lucy Stone!

The next in Hallmark’s Austen lineup is a ripoff of Lost in Austen (2008), this one titled An American in Austen (2024). The main difference is that instead of the main character swapping places with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, the American main character in Hallmark’s movie just joins Lizzie and all the other characters of Austen’s novel.

Here, Harriet is a librarian/frustrated writer who’s obsessed with Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Darcy in particular. Her very nice boyfriend proposes marriage in a clever fashion, but because he’s not literally Mr. Darcy, she doesn’t say yes. Instead, she falls asleep in a cab on the way home, and that’s where she wakes up in the Austen novel. She arrives at the Bennet house where they believe she’s an American cousin, and she joins the action of the story from the first ball where Jane and Bingley hit it off.

While the premise seemed like it was just going to be an American copy, I found myself enjoying this one. Lizzie and Jane mocking Harriet for being an old maid as an unmarried woman over 30 was amusing, and the scenes between Harriet and Mary and then Harriet and Mrs. Bennet gave a thoughtful perspective on the changing role of women between Austen’s time and now.

In general, the performances are solid, and that may be because the tone leans towards light comedy more than drama. Harriet’s presence, of course, messes up the events of Pride and Prejudice and she has to fix it all up, but this feels pretty low-stakes and classic rom-com. She learns her life lesson and returns to the present time to marry her real guy and write her own novel, which isn’t a spoiler because that’s just how Hallmark movies work.

The costume designer for this one was Irina Kotcheva, who’s Bulgarian, and that’s where much of this was filmed. I couldn’t find any press from her or about this flick in general, and I did notice a few recycled costumes, so I’m just going to assume a lot of rentals and off-the-rack stuff here. Which makes the visuals less offensive than the Hallmark Sense and Sensibility in many ways, except for one big one. Yep, a critical lack of hairpins and only occasional headgear!

But let’s start with an old classic, putting the modern girl in a corset for the first time, and doing so without a smock, plus lacing her up too tight (even better when this isn’t a tight-lacing era):

Harriet meets Darcy at this first ball and is impressed by how hot is, but I’m not seeing it. Meh?

When the Bennet gals go out to town the next day is where I spotted recycled costumes, first the pink embroidered pelisse also used in Hallmark’s Sense and Sensibility, on Jane here — maybe they were filmed at the same time, since they were both in Bulgaria?

I wonder if this one on Lydia is also recycled, because it’s adorable and appropriate for the period.

In another scene, she wears a charming blue spencer. The other sisters’ dresses are fine — at least the style and fit are in the general style of the period (unlike the last flick). The hair is all over the map. Only Jane consistently has her hair up.

Ditto hats. When they meet Wickham (who is very smarmy in this production), only two sisters have hats or their hair up. Also, everyone is missing petticoats.

The lack of petticoats is very obvious on Harriet at several times.

The ball at Netherfield most likely features a lot of rentals because it doesn’t look too bad — except for Lydia on the far right.

Harriet, the modern girl, is in red and looks fine.

Lizzie’s dress is just OK.

But this mostly gives me a chance to remind you of this gem that Kendra made way back for War & Peace (2016).

Women didn’t have solid bangs or fringe cut right across the forehead in the 1800s-1810s. That bit of hair was wispy and/or curled and pushed to the sides.

Oh and the real Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, appears at the ball as a special guest. Poor Fergie better have been paid well! I think she’s supposed to be in a late 18th-c. dress style in the trope of older women wearing outdated fashions.

Let’s round this out with a Battenburg lace parasol:

And the two proposals from the book, first Jane in a sweet little dress, maybe it was made for this movie, who knows?

And a recycled costume for Lizzie!

The last two Hallmark Austen-themed movies aren’t set in the Regency period at all, so they have minimal costume content. But I still watched them because I am a completionist if nothing else. I kind of enjoyed Paging Mr. Darcy (2024), probably because it’s set at a Jane Austen conference described in the flick as ‘a cross between an academic conference and Comic-Con for Jane fans.’ MY PEOPLE.

The story though is typical rom-com stuff — a professor, Eloise Cavendish, is going to this conference to deliver the keynote speech and also hopefully impress another professor who’s on the Princeton hiring committee. Eloise thinks she has to act dead serious to get the Princeton job, and she’s thwarted by the Mr. Darcy impersonator who’s assigned to be her guest liaison and is also the Princeton prof’s nephew (there’s your meet-cute).

This movie’s screenwriter Reina Hardy actually attended the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) to research the script. In an interview with JASNA, she said:

“I think romcoms function best when they contain dichotomies — sense vs. sensibility, as it were. I love that the AGM has both academic and fannish qualities — that you can learn thrilling, unexpected facts about dueling culture and colonialism one hour and drink tea in a costume the next. I wanted to play with that and have a main character with a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the way Austen can be devalued and dismissed because she writes about women and marriage … perhaps enough of a chip that she can’t quite let herself have fun as an Austen fan.”

This movie is fun, if predictable. The actors don’t have a lot of heavy lifting to do, so they’re fine. There are some little in-jokes for those who’ve attended events like this, which I appreciated. Costume designer Jennifer Stroud has done a ton of these Hallmark flicks, so undoubtably the faux Mr. Darcy outfit was just pulled from rental stock.

The final scene is at the conference’s ball, where some attendees attempt period costume. Results vary wildly.

Finally, my last Hallmark Austen-related flick, Love & Jane (2024). This is completely set in modern times, and the ghost of Jane Austen shows up to advise the main character. This was the dumbest of all four with a convoluted plot about a copywriter, Lilly, who runs an Austen book club and is trying to write her own novel, while a tech bro takes over a building but is also her advertising client, and eventually becomes her love interest. Whatever.

When Lilly stresses about writing her book, Jane Austen’s ghost manifests, looking like this:

Costume designer Jaralin Detienne is another Hallmark movie regular, so I’m sure Regency fashion isn’t in her usual sphere of operations. But honey, I know you bought Jane’s dress on Amazon!  I’ve bought it, I know plenty of others who have! It’s a super-basic polyester dress with elastic waist and sleeves and a ribbon belt, costs about $25.

And I guess it was too short for the actress, so they actually did have to buy a petticoat too (along with a shrug to fake a spencer):

This is the personification of sad trombone!

 

 

Happy April Fools Day! Have you seen any of these Hallmark Jane Austen movies?