Emily

With her directorial debut, the actress Frances O’Connor exhibits a powerful aesthetic with a loose portrait of the life of a major English writer.

A natural talent: Emma Mackey with Fionn Whitehead as Branwell

Like filmmaking, writing is one of the most difficult crafts to pull off effectively. Frances O’Connor’s accomplished directorial debut tells the story of four siblings, all with a yen to write. The lone brother, Branwell, was the first to have a stab, and requested an honest opinion from his younger sister, Emily. And she was candid, describing his prose as “lazy, self-important, clichéd and soppy,” among other things. Later, Emily herself put pen to paper and created a fiction that her sister Charlotte called, “ugly and base – full of ugly people who only care about themselves.”

It might have been easy for Frances O’Connor, who played Fanny Price in Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (1999), to have mined the melodrama at the heart of such a histrionic story. Instead, she pulls back from pounding the obvious notes, serving her actors more than her own cinematic ambition. Emily, unlike two other biopics from Australian filmmakers this year (Elvis and Blonde), does not draw attention to the director’s baton. Besides the consummate collaboration of the sound designer, production designer and cinematographer, O’Connor has found herself with perhaps the year’s most distinguished and delightful score, courtesy of Poland’s Abel Korzeniowski. A good director must suppress their own ego and have faith in the ability of those they hire.

Many audience members will be familiar with the extraordinary saga of the Brontë sisters, something O’Connor takes on trust. So she focuses on Emily, peeling away the psychological complexity of the writer (and school teacher), an astute, enormously talented and rebellious figure born into a world of inflexible men and religious dogma. And O’Connor proves as daring as her subject, choosing talented actors over star names, with only Gemma Jones slipped in as an affectionate nod to British costume drama. The director’s real coup, though, is the casting of Emma Mackey in the title role, in her first cinematic lead. Tempering her character’s febrile passion and mischief with a keen intelligence, Mackey delivers a star-making turn, just three years after her first professional appearance (as Maeve Wiley) in TV’s Sex Education. Already noted for her resemblance to Margot Robbie, Mackey really does light up the screen, physically and emotionally. Her scenes of French instruction from the morally upright curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are particularly choice, as Mackey was actually born in Le Mans. But unlike the Paris-born Isabelle Adjani, who played Emily in André Téchiné's Les Sœurs Brontë (1979), she is every inch the Yorkshire firebrand.

It is a shame that the facts (and chronology) have been shifted for dramatic effect, as there is enough drama here to propel a Netflix series. Still, it’s a good deal closer to the truth than the 1946 biopic Devotion, in which Emily was played by Ida Lupino. However, Sally Wainwright’s brilliant TV film To Walk Invisible (2016), with Chloe Pirrie as Emily, remains the last word on the Brontë sorority. Nonetheless, O’Connor’s script captures the essence of the family’s austere existence, as well as the festering misogyny of the times, with the screen whipped by the Yorkshire moors and stuffed with Georgian interiors to die for. This is a more intimate telling, more in keeping with a film like Lady Macbeth, its deft transitions of tone building to a slow-burn, powerful, heart-rending finale.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Adrian Dunbar, Amelia Gething, Gemma Jones, Sacha Parkinson. 

Dir Frances O’Connor, Pro Jo Bamford, David Barron, Robert Patterson and Piers Tempest, Ex Pro Abel Korzeniowski, Screenplay Frances O’Connor, Ph Nanu Segal, Pro Des Steve Summersgill, Ed Sam Sneade, Music Abel Korzeniowski, Costumes Michael O’Connor, Sound Niv Adiri and Tom Sayers, Dialect coach Zabarjad Budgie Salam. 

Embankment Films/Ingenious Media/Tempo Productions/Arenamedia-Warner Bros.
130 mins. UK/USA. 2022. UK Rel: 14 October 2022. Cert. 15.