A Film Canon

Vanity Fair is essentially a revisionist novel, taking an outdated form - the eighteenth-century picaresque narrative, as pioneered by Henry Fielding - and considering how it allays the fears of a socially conservative readership by presenting those fears as entertainment. It's appropriate, then, that it should have taken so long for a satisfactory cinematic adaptation to come along, just because the very aspirational nostalgia that Thackeray so mercilessly targets is also that of the cinematic costume drama, meaning that such an adaptation could also only exist as a revisionist gesture, as a conflation of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel and twentieth-century costume drama into a new object of wry critique. It's this conflation that gives Mira Nair's adaptation such an unusual, unsettling quality, and sets it apart from most comforting costume dramas of recent times. Just as Thackeray presents the reader with a parody of their own readership - the Countess of Southdown, who loves class mobility in her novels, but not in her family - so Nair presents the viewer with a striking parody of their own spectatorship, building the apex of Becky Sharp's (Reese Witherspoon) social climb - her audience with the King - around her performance of an Indian tableau vivant. On the one hand, this extends Thackeray's nostalgia for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into a more general nostalgia for the foundational days of British India. However, Becky's performance is also anachronistic - or at least feels anachronistic - and it's this cultivated anachronism that positions it as part of a twentieth-century fascination with Indian exoticism and colonial history. In this way, Nair presents the costume drama, at least in its contemporary incarnation, as colonial nostalgia - something that people in ostensibly post-colonial societies, with ostensibly post-colonial mindsets, cluster around to furtively indulge their colonial fantasies. What's striking is that Nair doesn't so much critique or condemn this fantasy as just explicitly present it, with the result that there's no meaningful difference, in the film, between India and the past. Everything and every place - with the possible exception of London, centre of imaginary empire - is suffused with an iridescent sheen, the shimmering of air around flames, or of light dispersed across peacock feathers, in a kind of flattening of Thackeray's words into his etched, textural illustrations. Anamorphically alternating between two and three dimensions, Nair's trompe l'oeil mannerism not only provides an elegant answer to the problem of translating an essentially theatrical novel into film, but presents theatre itself as just another iteration of this colonial nostalgia, as if the real, unspeakable desire of a costume drama audience were simply to go to the theatre; or, rather, to simply be in a theatre, for everyday life to be shot through with the colonial theatricality and ceremony of Nair's alteration of Thackeray's ending, in which fantasy isn't restored through falling in love, being married or giving birth, but by administering Indians.