I see people saying that the "modern" tone, dialogue, jokes, and narration style are out of place in what is supposedly (from dress, technology, and other details) a period piece--they specify that they don't mind modern adaptations (Clueless, even Bridget Jones' Diary is mentioned with generosity!) so long as they bill themselves as such (e.g. "if they wanted to make a modern adaptation, they should have just made a modern adaptation"). We don't expect a period piece to make such unabashedly modern jokes or references. But why not? We are offended when our expectations of what a "period piece" is are transgressed against. But why? We insist that these modes of storytelling (the "period" and the "modern") must not be mixed. But why not?

Quotations of the more obviously "modern" concepts and turns of phrase in the dialogue are trotted out ("I'm an empath," "exes," "alone, in my room, with a bottle of red," "if you're a 5 in London you're a 10 in Bath")--but then we kind of stop there, as though it is enough to say that this sounds awkward in a period setting. Of course it sounds awkward in a period setting--it's obvious enough that even the writers undoubtedly knew it sounded jarring and were doing it on purpose. So what might this instinctive recoiling from this type of period mish-mash tell us about what we usually hope to get out of period pieces? Obviously every adaptation is "modern" in that it is produced for an audience of the producers' contemporaries, and in that the sensibilities of the "original" will inevitably be shifted in a thousand ways more or less perceptible to us--so what we can we learn from the places where these shifts raise our ire, as opposed to the places where they go largely unnoticed (a shift to a modern concept of "romantic" love that removes much of the requirement of tutelage, for example--no adaptation that I know of has Mr. Bennet tell Elizabeth to look up to her husband "as a superior")?

Literary-critical-style analyses of the adaptation complain that it got Anne Elliot "wrong" (interestingly, the people saying this have pretty different interpretations of her character amongst themselves). I don't think this is untrue so much that I wish we could push this conversation further. Assertions that the adaptation "failed" assume what its goals were--but what can we deduce about the team's goals from interviews (which I admit I haven't read) or from the film itself? Why do these goals offend us so much? We have a feeling that an adaptation has to "respect" its source material (I recall one person in a youtube video essay baldly stating as much)--but why? What happens when an adaptation does not respect its source material, in terms of literary or adaptation / book-to-film studies or in terms of the commercial marketplace for movies? How does this movie reveal its own assumptions to us? How does it reveal our assumptions to us? Has it stumbled onto anything clever in its attempt to be more, well... 'clever'? What's going on with the audience-addressing narration? What pitches and shifts does that produce? How does it compare to Austen's narration? Why is this kind of question fruitful or unfruitful to ask of an adaptation?

For anyone who doesn't already get it, this isn't a 'defense' of Netflix's Persuasion (nothing with so much money behind it needs me to defend it). I just wish we were asking more interesting questions!!!

here it is compared to hubbles image:

Fort Plain, New York