Wide Sargasso Sea

Director John Duigan brings Jean Rhys' difficult 1966 best-selling novel to the screen. It's a story meant to be a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's novel -Jane Eyre, surmising what drove the first Mrs. Rochester mad in that novel. In Jamaica in the 1840s, slavery has been recently outlawed. Plantation ...more

John Duigan's film version of the Jean Rhys novel, something of a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's -Jane Eyre, is an extraordinarily atmospheric visualization of the decline of a marriage. The plot explores the first marriage of Jane Eyre's, Mr. Rochester (Nathaniel Parker), from the first blush of romance with beautiful Jamaican plantation heiress Antoinette Cosway (Karina Lombard) to the disintegration of the union at the hands of a cruelly autocratic husband. Although the characterization is ...more