(2008) Escaping into her favorite book, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, from her ordinary life, 27-year-old bank employee Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper), muses, "It's like I'm actually there," after many re-readings, admiring the manners, language, and courtesy among the author's early-19th-century characters. Her mother complains of her wasting her life pretending to be someone she isn't.

Amanda lives in a flat in London with her roommate Pirhana Spencer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw); her inconstant boyfriend Michael Dolan (Daniel Percival) proposes when he's drunk. Into her bathroom steps Elizabeth Bennet (Gemma Arterton) through a magical portal. When they exchange places, red-headed Amanda, wearing a black leather jacket, enters the Bennet household of Longbourn just as the novel begins.

Originally a four-episode TV miniseries, recomposed on DVD as a nearly three-hour, continuous feature, director Dan Zeff and screenwriter Guy Andrews have re-imagined the famous fiction (Is Austen spinning in her grave "like a cat in a tumble dryer"?) as a modern fantasy/romance with high-production values and a smart British cast, dramatically displaying real emotional integrity, with humorous spoofs on the 1995 BBC production (starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle) but without gratuitous goofiness.

Explaining what must appear as strange attire as her otter-hunting outfit, Amanda of Hammersmith tells Elizabeth's parents - Claude (Hugh Bonneville) and his wife (Alex Kingston) - and their four other daughters - Jane (Morven Christie), Lydia (Perdita Weeks), Mary (Ruby Bentall), and Kitty (Florence Hoath) - that she and her friend Elizabeth, who is writing a novel, have "done a sort of swap."

Unable to return back through the door to her own time and place, Amanda, who has brought along a copy of the novel and her useless cellphone, along with a few other items of the 21st century, demands if this is "like the Jim Carrey-thing, but period," or a prank with hidden cameras before settling into her role of trying to make sure events follow Austen's text. In some respects Amanda, (admittedly "a bit odd, talks funny" with a bad habit of saying the wrong things) who initially impresses others with her "Delphic, prefiguring" of events, such as the arrival of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (Elliot Cowan) of Pemberty, and her attempts at matchmaking, which go awry, especially Jane with Charles Bingley (Tom Mison), suggests as well the heroine of Emma.

Charlotte Lucas (Michelle Duncan) crossly inquires: "What sort of trick are you, Miss Price?" Suspicious, taking almost an immediate dislike of Amanda for her "provoking of attention," Mrs Bennet, perplexed by the "unkempt and indelicate" girl's oracular methods and "radical manners," sternly warns the guest not to obstruct her daughters' quests for husbands. At her first ball, Charles takes enormous interest in Amanda, to the detriment of Jane's hopes, though she refuses to dance with him, resulting in Mr Darcy's becoming her partner and critic for humiliating his friend; afterward she confides that Fitzwilliam is not Colin Firth and "doesn't float my boat."

Attempting to communicate with Elizabeth on the other side of the locked door upstairs, Amanda clamors: "Nothing is happening the way it should." At Netherfield, where she has insisted Jane must ride during a downpour to see Charles, Amanda produces a paracetamol tablet (antipyretic) for Jane's fever before telling Charles, to dampen his still being enamored with her, that she's "drawn to other women." As for Charles's predatory ("conniving, smirking") sister Caroline (Christina Cole), Amanda confesses: "I never understood her as a character."

When Capt George Wickham (Tom Riley) makes a timely arrival to gallantly rescue Amanda and others in a carriage with a broken wheel, she snarls at him: "Back off! I know you." But she doesn't, and she gradually realizes of Mr Darcy: "You misjudge everybody."

In a gambit to save Jane from having to wed William Zeal of the Lord Collins (Guy Henry), Amanda accedes to a marriage proposal from "the preening caliban," whom she later knees in the crotch; he then breaks off the engagement, declaring her to be the daughter of a fishmonger. Dismissed from the Bennets' home (though Mr Bennet, accepting from Elizabeth's letter, having been passed under the door to Amanda, her word vouchsafing Amanda as trustworthy), Amanda goes to Wickham, who praises her for having "spunk." At Rosings, she makes acquaintance with Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Lindsay Duncan).

His having told her directly of his "disappointment" - "You're so relentlessly unpleasant" - Amanda is astonished when Mr Darcy changes his tune entirely, making her feel like an understudy when the star fails to show: "The entire world will hate me."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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