Emily Mortimer's "The Pursuit of Love" makes us think deeply about what great love really is
Romantic, fleeting love goes under the microscope making us question which is more impactful and all-consuming - romantic love or platonic love?
Warning: Spoiler alert ahead for The Pursuit of Love
At the end of the 1945 novel that the limited series The Pursuit of Love (now streaming on Amazon Prime) is based on there’s a scene in which Fanny (Emily Beecham, Into the Badlands), the narrator, and our resident “sticker” meaning the woman that chose a more conventional “stick around” path to her life says to her mother of her cousin and best friend' Linda’s lost love:
“But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.' Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.”
Linda (Lily James, Downton Abbey), Fanny’s cousin, also known as “the bolter” like Fanny’s own mother (played by the series’ director, Emily Mortimer), who left Fanny with her aunt as a newborn, has an aversion to spending life with one person and is in a perpetual search for great romantic love. She tends to leave people she loves, like Fanny, at a whim depending on who captivates her at the moment. She’s not fickle, so much as restless and bored and without many options to advance her life on her own terms.
Linda is mercurial and prone to excessive bouts of happiness and sadness at a moment’s notice which makes her irresistible to suitors and admirers who see this untethered heart as vulnerable, volatile, and more feminine as compared to Fanny’s educated, and restrained presence.
If I have one complaint about the adaption, which I understand takes liberties in Mortimer’s version, it’s that the lens of the narrative is so fixed on Linda. It’s like no one has anything to think about or discuss about apart from how much they are obsessed with Linda (if they are a man) or how much they resent her or how jealous they are (if they are woman). I wanted more independence from Linda in the narrative because while she’s a lot of beguiling adjectives, she also sucks the air out of the room, always. But as Fanny admits to, as angry as she might be with Linda for her wanton abandon to her for most of their adult life “Within 30 minutes, she’s forgiven her.” Linda is after all “a meteor prone to showing [Fanny] with her extravagance.” and for anyone who’s experienced love like this, even in its fleeting form, it's hard to extricate from.
Linda’s father, upper-class Jingoist Uncle Matthew (Dominic West), patriarch of the Alconleigh manor who hunts for sport, thinks humans take a backseat to animals and that his children are sport - meant to be belittled, hunted and chained to his manor forever with no regard for educating them. The more curious of the children long for adventure and release while the “stickers” do just that - stick around. Uncle Matthew is a sort of villain in the series by way of depiction but he’s not played to a caricature affect and that’s credit to West’s acting.
Slight gossip aside here: Remember seeing months ago pictures of Lily James and Dominic West emerge that pointed to a romance by way of their “cozying up” time together in Italy? Well, this is the series that they met each other on. Read here for more on that . West was and is still married and James single.
Back to the show, as they like to say…
Keep in mind the novel/limited series takes place during the 20s-40s in interwar England when cultural adoration gravitated to a group of Bohemian upper class socialites - also referred to as “Bright Young Things” (read Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” or watch the film adaption of the novel Bright Young Things on Peacock to get the gist of that era. The film coincidentally also stars Emily Mortimer).
Perhaps the most entertaining character, at least initially, is Andrew Scott’s (The Priest from Fleabag) Lord Merlin. He’s like a character out of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby with seductive song/dance swagger, snubbing his nose at convention and Linda’s choices because they narrow her options, unwilling to see that she doesn’t have many. Honestly every time Scott’s in a scene not wearing something 1920s or 70s fabulous and giving seductive eyes, I think is just wasted time which is why he got boring fast because how many song and dance #s can you do? (um, yes i’m looking at you, Schmigadoon!")
If you like to peek behind the scenes, to appreciate the story, I suggest digging into the the background of its author, Nancy Mitford, who was one of the 6 Mitford sisters, known as the Bright Young Things of their time, who came from an Upper class British family, not unlike the Radletts in The Pursuit of Love.
Of the sisters, two became fascists - one was Hitler’s mistress, one left her husband for Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the Fascist Party in England, and at least one of the others leaned left towards Communism. Nancy, the eldest, and Deborah, the youngest were both authors and less political or politically polarizing perhaps than their other siblings. Either way, I’ve had this book: The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters on my Amazon read list for a while. And something tells me it’s worth the read.
That’s all of for this week. Enjoy watching this and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.