vices and virtues of the English nobles of the early twentieth century (score 7)- Corriere.it

Vices, virtues, sighs, illusions of the English noble class of the early twentieth century, neighbors of “Downtown Abbey” in the pleasant miniseries “Rincorrendo l’amore” (The pursuit of love), on Sky streaming and NOW on demand, where they are cultivated the seeds of romance but then in the end there is always a war lurking that throws social conventions and roles upside down. And, as in tradition, say Jane Austen, there is a strong female alliance of complicity, the war of the sexes was deeply felt, at least until more than half of the story which derives from the 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford, a very skilled writer and also biographer of famous lives (Louis XIV, Pompadour, Voltaire, Frederick II of Prussia…), published by Adelphi, like all his work.

The very English cast sees the center of the alliance of the two girls Lily James, who was in «Downtown» and is now filming with Saverio Costanzo, Emily Beecham, his character neighbor and best friend, Andrew Scott («Fleabag»), Dominic West, the heartthrob of «The Affair» and Emily Mortimer (“Shutter Island”) who also signs the direction, keeping the story in a delicate balance between the elegance of the times, the boiseries of the interiors, the bows of the servants but also the irrepressible stimuli of a passion that will bring one of two girls to Paris, where he will perhaps find another beautiful and impossible love.

We are in Europe waiting for the world war and Linda, with her cousin and best friend Fanny, abandoned by her mother and raised by her aunt, are looking for the ideal man who has all the virtues, including that of endurance. Also because finding a husband in 1920s Oxfordshire was a way to escape a family of eccentric traditions. Linda is the one most vulnerable to Cupid’s arrows and the story enjoys tracing the identikit of the various socio-political types on the market: the first will be a right-wing conservative husband, but then the communist Marxist husband arrives. Fanny, on the other hand, is the more balanced and reasonable, she marries not out of passion but out of happy understanding with a professor who is obsessed with order and from now on her role will be that of being a mother, while Linda does not take care of her only daughter Moira, rented out to relatives.

But when her husband also left gives in to the flattery of another woman, Linda would like to go home, but remains in Paris due to a misunderstanding, even though she immediately finds a noble and wealthy suitor, Count Fabrice de Sauveterre, a beautiful Proustian name, who solves her problems of food and accommodation. Still missing the last surprise that sees the two friends united and also a certain reversal of roles, while the world still throws itself into playing war. Interestingly, some of the material in this novel, which certainly lacks neither action nor feeling, is autobiographical, for Mitford (daughter of the first editor of Vanity Fair) was raised in a brood with the six legendary Mitford sisters. » and therefore with the cheerfulness of the great houses with large estates and long tables.

Nancy began to travel, had a debut in society presented to King George III and also became friends with a great writer-reporter like Evelyn Waugh, eventually marrying the homosexual scion of a high-ranking family, but her marriage career continued for a long time. It was she herself, as in the novel, who was attracted first by the fascism of Sir Oswald Mosley and then by her bitter enemy, historical cycles and recycles. In the romantic comedy that first the book and now the series tell with elegance and attention also to the big issues, there are, suitably disguised, almost all the members of his eventful family, so much so that “Pursuit of love” sold, in a literary panorama dominated by Virginia Woolf, 200,000 copies and was the cause of Nancy’s move to Paris, but with refined summers in Venice: death struck her in Versailles at 69 in 1973.