Four Weddings and Sense & Sensibility.

Both sense and sensibility and four weddings and a funeral are two very different styled films primarily because of the time they are set in. Four weddings and a funeral depicts a much more ‘easy going’ view of weddings and how women are shown generally given the modern view where marriage is not necessarily the norm. In sense and sensibility this is an entirely different story as women were expected to live with their parents until (if they were luck enough) they got married. In the time sense and sensibility was set unmarried cohabitation was seen as completely absurd. In sense and sensibility women are basically treated as second class citizens due to social rankings, this can be seen early on in the film as the fathers estate must be passed down to a male descendant, leaving the women of the family virtually destitute. Within in sense and sensibility there are very few references to breaking of stereotypes but one part I picked up on was when a young girl corrects a ‘gentlemen’ on his geographic knowledge. This applies both to age and gender as the man is considerably older than the girl and being female the girl lacks both power and authority.

Four weddings, being a Curtis film is about a young man who falls head over heels in love with a mysterious girl being assured that she is the one for him. The ending however depicts quite a powerful message as he doesn’t end up marrying her, the message of course being that you do not have to be married to be happy. For example in four weddings one of the characters states his theory about marriage, which is that people only get married when they have exhausted all other resources within their relationships which is a very post-modern thing to say. This again is another very conflicting difference between the two films as sense and sensibility very bluntly implies that getting married is more or less the most ‘sensible’ and ‘happy’ thing you can achieve in your lifetime, however it could also be interpreted as a form of escape from their family life that the have been tied to for so long.

Funnily enough the class that is displayed in each of the movies are at about the same level (middle bordering on upper). Although the two classes shown are the same they are perceived in different ways as in four weddings money doesn’t seem as important, where as in sense and sensibility you get the feeling that money is favoured for the wrong reasons, for example for generally keeping up appearances. Hugh Grant appears in both the films as very different characters, never the less this can be seen as a similarity in respect to British casting. Unfortunately I don’t have a large amount to write about camera shots although one that I noticed in sense and sensibility was a slow paced, sweeping tracking shot which passed a number of portraits of passed generations of people within the family in question. This was used to show the wealth of the family which again allows the audience to feel empathy for the women who have been cheated out of any money being left to them.

In relation to Britishness these films have aspects that are very British and some that are not. For example in the more modern set of the two films (Four Weddings) it only depicts middle and upper class lifestyle, where as a lot of other British films have been commended for their gritty realistic approach to life today, generally displaying working class life also. This can been linked to sense and sensibility also in a way as the women who have been denied access to the majority of the money left in their family have to make large lifestyle changes, such as moving house, firing servants and cutting down on ‘luxuries’ that they have been so accustomed to.