I wasn’t sure about how they made Fanny’s character a bit of a ditz, but I can’t remember the novel clearly enough to know whether that’s accurate I did love the intensity and almost romantic/sexual connection between best friends Linda and Fanny, which rings true to my own experience of female friendship.

That being said, I was decently entertained and only rolled my eyes a few times. Which, was semi-annoying because this is something that’s been done to death, and was so obviously derivative of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. So yes, the three-part series includes a mix of modern and period music, and Mortimer’s directorial style is definitely more frenetic and chaotic than the much more classic Love in a Cold Climate. I wanted this to be as entertaining for people to watch as it was for me to reread the book all these years later” ( Emily Mortimer on Writing, Directing, and Starring in The Pursuit of Love). It’s a little homage to Sofia Coppola, because the way she dealt with period in that movie felt really exciting to me. I also watched all of Sofia Coppola’s movies again, because I love her, and I took a lot of inspiration from Marie Antoinette actually, the New Order song is completely stolen from Marie Antoinette.

I wanted it to feel like it was a sort of French New Wave film that was about the 1930s.

That’s probably a terrible cliche, but I did I looked at Agnes Varda movies, I looked at Jules et Jim, which you realize is a period film, but set in the 1960s. I looked at lots of French New Wave movies. “To me, the book is a very rock and roll, I think it’s got a punk-rock soul for many reasons and there’s a wildness to it… I realized going along that it wasn’t a mistake that I thought this was kind of a rock and roll story, because all these rock and rollers had obviously seen something in the book that spoke to them… I was very inspired by lots of things. And, of course, her approach was to modernize the story in order to make it relevant to contemporary audiences (yawn):

This version was the directorial debut of actress Emily Mortimer ( Bright Young Things, Mary Poppins Returns), who also wrote the screenplay. The real-life Mitford sisters: Unity, Diana, and Nancy (author of the source novel).

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford