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such a great piece!

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I've been sitting here alternately delighted with (Marie Antoinette) and grossed out by (Persuasion, Bridgerton) this genre for however many years, and couldn't quite put into words exactly what was separating the wheat from the chaff. But you've done it! I nodded. A lot.

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Fascinating piece. I couldn't help but notice that the macaron time clash extends far past period piece movies or tv series slamming into "hard " history. You see it when so many judge someone who lived 150 years ago by todays standards, language and culture norms thus completely missing the point in my opinion. Human beings being human is just rejected by the judgmental. Is it because they can see themselves in those they are judging and don't want to?

Again, great piece.

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Feb 4, 2023·edited Feb 4, 2023

"To put it another way, it’s hard to be historically accurate without replicating the suppression of women and minoritised groups."

I think it is possible to be speculative (speculate about certain perspectives on certain topics that went mostly unrecorded) and still be reasonably historically accurate. I'm not sure what "replicating" means here. If by "replicating" you mean "potraying as it was" then I agree, although I'm not sure why that would be something to avoid.

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Marie Antoinette happens to be my favorite movie! It is the perfect portrait of excess (which would become her downfall and something of ours as well). The historicity of it is almost entirely irrelevant in this context, it is decadence and indulgence and how that feels frivolous to the rich, who are blissfully unaware of the consequences those luxuries inflict on the poor. The Revolution came for that excess, but familiar rebellions live on in “tax the rich” or “climate criminals” sentiments. Jeff Bezos was unable to remove his superyacht from a Rotterdam harbor after residents were incensed that he would disassemble a local bridge (and reassemble it afterward) for the sake of his own excess.

And I suppose that’s the point of the macaron time clash, to make history relatable today (even though in the case of Bridgeton I think it’s more about the romance novel trope of the “forbidden love” which is harder to make the case for today 😝). To your point, the fact that these films relate to us at all in the modern era is maybe the only way to share them! A strict period drama would be un-understandable to anyone but a scholar of those time periods who could interpret the context of every sexual innuendo that, though made explicit for us today, would have been entirely implicit to them then. Long live the time clash? 😆

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After one season of Bridgerton I was annoyed and have not watched another episode. I loved Marie Antoinette to the point of owning the DVD back when you did such things with films you obsessed upon. It holds up beautifully for me. I have not seen The Favourite and hadn’t been keen to see it until reading this and now I will just to put this article to the test.

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deletedFeb 5, 2023Liked by Rowan Davies
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