This production’s commitment to interpreting the past through the lens of the present may strike viewers – who have already seen the Georgian heroines of Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton gavotte to Taylor Swift’s ‘Wildest Dreams’ and witnessed children dancing to David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ in Taika Waititi’s Second World War tragicomedy Jojo Rabbit – as far less audacious than it seemed 15 years ago, when Coppola’s film was released to jeers at the Cannes Film Festival. With its distinctive visual style and contemporary soundtrack, the series joins a string of period pieces following from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) that embrace, and even naturalise, anachronism. Emily Mortimer’s adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love is filled with such moments, in which the past converges with more recent eras. The scene could be from a documentary on Studio 54 on its disco heyday, but this is London between the wars: the era of Evelyn Waugh, the Bright Young Things and bohemian excess. Bathed in purple neon light and wearing a daringly cut dress dripping with metallic sequins, a woman writhes on a nightclub dance floor to Bryan Ferry’s 1974 glam-rock cover of ‘The “In” Crowd’.
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