Linda is “a wild and nervous creature full of passion and longing.” Fanny would like to “observe exciting things” but feels no need to upend her life in their pursuit. By placing these two women alongside one another on the mounting board, Amazon’s new miniseries considers what it means to love, to take risks, and to live well.
Based on the 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love follows two English cousins as they navigate the social and familial complexities of the interwar period. As played by Lily James (Downton Abbey, The Dig), Linda is brash and restless, the kind of girl who flops into occupied bathtubs while giving speeches about romance. Fanny, her closest companion as well as kinswoman, is portrayed by Emily Beecham (Hail, Caesar!) and is an altogether steadier representative of her sex. Enjoying the marital act in the show’s second episode, Fanny expresses only the slightest annoyance when her husband pauses to hang up his trousers properly.
The series begins on the Oxfordshire estate of Alconleigh, where the 17-year-old cousins are straining under the rule of Uncle Matthew (Dominic West), a comically grim disciplinarian who “loathes educated females” and cracks stock whips on the lawn every morning. Whiling away the days until their coming out, Linda and Fanny spend hours staring out of windows and imagining their increasingly proximate futures. When adulthood finally arrives, Linda enters a string of liaisons meant to satisfy her capacious appetites. (“I want to have fun and wear high heels and go to the cinema and have sex and be adored by a man and be in love.”) Fanny, meanwhile, settles down with Alfred (Shazad Latif), a university don of precise habits, and the two women commence their exploration of the relative merits of freedom and domesticity.
Hovering symbolically over The Pursuit of Love is a woman whose actions serve as both a warning and a model to the younger generation. A figure so inconstant that even Uncle Matthew refers to her as The Bolter, Fanny’s mother is a man-in-every-port globetrotter who appears from time to time to call on her abandoned daughter and preview her niece’s fate. Played by Emily Mortimer (The Newsroom), who also wrote and directed the series, The Bolter is not so much a character as an emblem of transgressive femininity. It isn’t that she doesn’t know the rules. It’s that society’s boundaries were not carved with people like her in mind.
Among Mortimer’s talents as an auteur is her ability to evoke a culture of old-fashioned norms without vanishing into the sepia-tinted past. In part, she achieves this balance through vibrant casting, assigning, for example, the terrific Andrew Scott (Sherlock) to the role of a neighboring nobleman who is anything but stodgy. Elsewhere, however, Mortimer’s success is purely technical. Effecting her transitions with what appear to be archival photographs and footage, the first-time director gradually brings such “antique” material to full-color life and springs us off into the resulting scenes. The effect of these visual reversals is charming rather than disorienting. More importantly, they underscore the crucial fact about period dramas: People such as these may have lived long ago, but they really did live.
Like many narratives that weigh competing visions of the good, The Pursuit of Love spends the bulk of its time observing its characters’ choices. Fanny, determined not to follow in her mother’s footsteps, is happy enough with her husband and children but recognizes that her life is a succession of compromises. (Note Alfred’s complaint about the presence of a marmalade spoon in the jam jar.) Linda, a bright young thing without a shred of self-discipline, does exactly as she pleases but knows that she would be “lost” without her cousin and lodestar.
Unsurprisingly, Fanny’s traditional existence receives less screen time than Linda’s Bohemianism. Yet the series is decidedly not a rebuke of the former or an endorsement of the latter. “It’s the bravest thing in the world to stay put,” an admiring Linda tells Fanny in an honest moment. By the closing episode, many viewers will be inclined to agree.
This is not to say, of course, that The Pursuit of Love is a mere advertisement for conventional values. Rather, the show works precisely because it declines to throw in its lot with one side or the other. Helping matters greatly where this neutrality is concerned are the evenly matched performances of James and Beecham, both of whom shine as members of a society that casts all women as either “bolters” or “stickers.” To be sure, James’s is the showier role, delivering her not only from bed to bed but through a range of acute emotions. Beecham, however, more than holds her own as a woman in the thick of a satisfactory marriage. Her plotline may be quieter than James’s, but the subtlety of her portrayal ensures that it is never boring.
Indeed, The Pursuit of Love’s greatest achievement may be its ability to merge its dual stories into a thoughtful and entertaining whole. As for its ultimate message, one ought not to overlook The Bolter herself, Fanny’s mother, whose weary, half-satirical pronouncement serves as one part of a peppery thesis. Love, in all of its variety, is obviously necessary. But whoever invented it “ought to be shot.”
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
