Product Description

A prequel to "Jane Eyre." An Englishman in nineteenth-century Jamaica falls into a tortured marriage with a native Creole. When the woman begins to go mad, her husband takes her back to his gothic estate in England, where he locks her in the attic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15126 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2003-11-04
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

From The New Yorker
John Duigan's adaptation of Jean Rhys's strange and memorable 1966 novel is set in the West Indies of the mid-nineteenth century, and an air of thick tropical sensuality pervades the movie's imagery. The hero, a young Englishman named Edward Rochester (Nathaniel Parker), arrives in Jamaica sick with fever after his long ocean passage; his stay on the island, during which he marries a ravishing Creole heiress named Antoinette Cosway (Karina Lombard), is a blur of heightened perception and disordered reason. As the marriage goes bad, events take on a nightmarish inevitability, as if they were moving toward a preordained end. They are: the hero of this picture is the younger self of the Rochester that Charlotte Brontë created in "Jane Eyre," the brooding landowner who kept his mad wife locked up in his English estate house; and Antoinette is the young woman who became his prisoner and his shameful secret. Duigan and his cinematographer, Geoff Burton, merge the luxuriant erotic tension of a tropical idyll with the clammy apprehension of gothic fiction. And the film is so serenely paced and so envelopingly lovely to watch that you may not realize until the end that it is, in the deepest sense, a horror movie-an intimate portrayal of the relationship between a monster and his victim. Also with Claudia Robinson, Rowena King, Rachel Ward, and Michael York. Stewart Copeland's score is superb. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

The Wide Sargasso Sea: A Rich and Thrilling Seachange
When "The Wide Sargasso Sea" was first released in New York, it had received excellent reviews, an R rating and very little attention. I just happened to see a small advertisement in the New York Times one day. It was the title alone that intrigued me. From the moment the film began with that sensual and evocative soundtrack, I sensed we were in for something truly different and original.

"The Wide Sargasso Sea" is a brilliant collaboration of a gifted director, John Duigan, a strong, well paced screenplay and actors who are sublimely suited to their roles. Set in 19th century Jamaica,the screenplay transforms a fairly literal story by Jean Rhys into a rich and thrilling drama, which is driven as much by the individual conflicts and misunderstandings as it is by the cultural. "The Wide Sargasso Sea" is one of the few films that successfully combines the erotic with the lyrical;that depicts the complexity of human passion without becoming either literal or pedestrian.

With its lush, exotic setting,it is easy to become enmeshed in the endlessly subtle and colorful aspects of this film from the psychological to the sociological, individual difference to social conventions. But the story of Antoinette and Edward is the story of the delicate and precarious balance between love and knowledge, intimacy and trust, choice and destiny. So that once seeing "The Wide Sargasso Sea", you will have to see it again.

Years later I bought the VHS and found that "The Wide Sargasso Sea" is one of those superb films that stands the test of time. If only, the producers had recorded the soundtrack with music by Stuart Copeland and some wonderfully original, electronic interpretations of classical string quartets. Why didn't they?

Best film on the Caribbean
This film is quite faithful to the tone and flow of the novel, which is now recognized as one of the great novels of the 20th century. I have been living in the Caribbean for the past year, and by doing so have more than ever begun to recognize the genius of this film. The film has a haunting quantity, and one can just feel the humid and seething sensuality of the place. The casting is wonderful, and the heroine is is a casting gem. She truly captures the vulnerability, possessiveness, and tragic qualities of Rhys' character. There really is no film that I know of that better captures the sense of the Caribbean as it was in the 18th/19th century better than this. A must see for those interested in the period, or the background to Jane Eyre.

This film was not faithful to the adaptation of the novel.
There's lots of passion in Wide Sargasso Sea THE BOOK, but it's mostly emotional. It's an extremely multi-layered novel and the work of a true master. The film on the other hand is just your classic, bad 1990s film, beautiful to look at, with lots of skin, languid copulation, heaving bosoms, bodice-ripping nonsense, etc and next to no substance. It has no artistic integrity whatsoever, as its shameless makers must surely know they lifted their middle finger at the spirit of the Jean Rhys novel when choosing to make the film the way they did.

I was unable to feel empathy for both the lead character. The much touted erotic scenes were not developed to what they lead to believe, and it also lacked much enthusiasm. They were incomplete and contributed little, if anything, to the plot. The viewer only gets a glimpse of the passion that supposedly exists between Edward and Antoinette. Therefore, they should have either gone all the way, tastefully (no pun intended), or have left those scenes out entirely.

Now with regards to the plot of this film there were enormous holes, which perhaps could be rectified by reading the book. But for those who haven't read the book, there should be enough information in the film itself to keep the reader afloat. From the start it was unclear what was really going on with this family (despite the narration). Why did the ex-slaves keep laughing? (Something vaguely explained in the movie, though apparently fully explained in the book). Why didn't the parrot fly away? What made the mother go nuts? At no point in the movie were Mr. Rochester's "issues", as it were, fully explained. The man gets a letter exposing his wife as a Creole and dumps her like a hot potato, after (as Christophene explains) he was the one who came crawling to her in the first place. What a hypocrite. Again, maybe this is the ultimate point, that Mr. Rochester is a snob and the archetypical Victorian Englishman and that Antoinette is the victim of both his prejudice and that of the Jamaicans. But none of that exonerates the appallingly abrupt conclusion to the film.

So, despite the beautiful cinematography, this movie is a hopeless muddle. I'd highly recommend the novel by the way: a book you don't forget in a hurry. Needless to say I think you should give this insulting (to the memory of Jean Rhys) film a miss, especially if you've read the novel: it'll just frustrate you, no matter how keen on a bit of easy titillation you may be feeling at the time.