Reviews

Taking advantage of the pandemic lockdown and Amazon Prime to compare different productions of the sprawling novel Vanity Fair. Last week I watched the 1987 series. Just finished watching this 1998 version. Next comes the 2018 series.

Interesting to see how different actors and performances can make you feel about a character, and there are so many characters with so many flaws.

Other reviewers wrote that they found the music in this series to be a bit off-putting, but I didn't see that anyone mentioned the strange photography. Frequent closeups - sometimes so tight that just part of a person's face filled the entire screen - distracted from the performances. Odd or "artsy" camera angles seemed to be trying hard to add something to the story but just detracted. I felt that the performances and the flow would have been better served with a little less camera action.

I listen to French news radio and heard a lot of coverage of this decades-old crime when the case was reopened a couple of years ago. But I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The names and relationships and who did what to whom were so confusing. Reading current French news articles did not clear up the confusion. Neither did English-language coverage. It wasn't until I got through all five episodes of this documentary that I was finally able to comprehend the story and why it has captivated the French for so long.

If you opt to watch in French, be advised that the subtitles move along at a rapid clip.