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What could be more parochial than a great capital of intellect and art? In this era of mass communications, cities like London, New York, and Paris remain deaf to all perceptions but their own, like vast golden hives whose denizens feed exclusively off their own brand of honey. Having recently moved from Paris to London, I am disconcerted by the ease with which matters of awesome urgency in one city (such as: who's going to tell Robert Bresson that the title of his new film, L'Argent, has already been used?) seem barely to engage one's attention in another.
It was Jane Austen's peculiar genius to transmute the apparently petty intrigues and flirtations of some not so grand houses in the English Home Counties into a network of allegiances no less fascinating (in the reading) than the revolutionary upheavals taking place just out of earshot; and it's the even more peculiar virtue of James Ivory's latest, best film, Jane Austen in Manhattan, quite simply to equate Manhattan's apparently momentous controversies with those of Mansfield Park.
That title, rather off-putting in its literalness, might more tellingly be presented thus:
Jane Austen
in
MANHATTAN
since the socio-cultural beat being covered is very much Woody Allen's, a world of Broadway musicals and offBroadway theater communes, Upper East Side endowment funds, and SoHo lofts, half-Liberty Hall, half-Annie Hall, and all lightly fried in Jane's eventenored irony, which the director and scenarist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala pastiche to far greater effect than they did the Jamesian variety in their last collaboration, The Europeans.
Briefly, the movie's narrative concerns the sale at Sotheby Parke Bernet of a rediscovered manuscript of Jane's Sir Charles Grandison,...