i've always liked the way that the 1999 version of
mansfield park ends. as director patricia rozema explains,
"I had written these tableaus at the end of the film in which everyone in the scene would suddenly become still, slip into reverie, stare off into the middle distance at exactly the same moment, and then, altogether, slip back into the day-to-day. When I wrote those moments in, I knew I'd never be able to explain exactly what they meant...[but it felt] like a filmic way to do what Austen was doing in the book."
it's a neat effect. a second of considering what might have been, how things could have gone, but didn't. a brief wide-angle view. and here in the big smoke where the days are stretching out like afternoon shadows, it's hard not to think about the things that have and haven't changed since the last time round. for a moment the music stops, the characters go still, and the narrator says, "it could have all turned out so differently i suppose. but it didn't."
