A young couple’s stormy romance scandalizes English society in this acclaimed adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic love story. Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds of the Royal Shakespeare Company are the star-crossed lovers, Anne and Wentworth, whose passion is thwarted by a scheming socialite. Eight yearslater, when Anne is considered an old maid and her once-rich family is on the verge of bankruptcy, Wentworth returns. Will their second chance at love be ruined by the social conventions that destroyed it once? Or will the heart be persuaded by rules of its own? Adding flirtatious fun to Austen’s irresistible romance, PERSUASION takes your breathe away! A dazzling five-star feast.
Everything depends on Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds in the key roles, and they are well cast as people who might not be everybody’s idea of perfection, but are each other’s. All of society seems arrayed against them – not through prejudice, not through ill-will, but through inhibition and hateful ground rules that prohibit them from speaking easily about the only subject that interests them, their future together. Much of the movie’s emotional work has to be done by their faces and eyes, while other people speak of other things, and to see that happening is frustrating, because it happens so slowly, and romantic, because it happens at all. – Roger Ebert
Originally the BBC was the sole producer of Persuasion, until it partnered with the American company WGBH Boston and the French company Millesime.
Shown on PBS Masterpiece Theatre.
Starring Amanda Root, Ciarán Hinds and Susan Fleetwood.
May be suitable for older children.
Parents need to know that this romance is fraught with lies, gossip, and manipulation, but very little in the way of sex or violence. Two people fall and injure themselves seriously — one, a child and one a teenage girl. The child falls off-screen and is carried limply back to his home. The teen falls on-screen and appears for a moment to have died. – Common Sense Media