Sense and Sensibility and Four Weddings and a Funeral – Britishness

Both Sense and Sensibility and Four Weddings and a Funeral both have lots of elements of Britishness that makes them very British films, but they are British in two totally different ways. The largest difference of Britishness is the timeline these films are set in. Four Weddings and a Funeral was set in the very late nineties, while Sense and Sensibility was set over a hundred years ago still in the time when women had absolutely no power compared to the men. However they still have similarities in some respects, such as the actors they use (Hugh Grant is in both films), the morals that the films are showing and the way that both are sending out political messages which were relevant to the times that they were filmed in. For instance, Sense and Sensibility was actually a book before a film written by Jane Austin. She used the book to show about the in-equality women have in society in Britain and she could of been also been saying something about the greed that people have for money and status by using the character fanny. In a similar way, Four Weddings and a Funeral have been thought to send out a political message about British society and what marriage means to people today. One of the characters in it talks of how people get married when they have nothing else to say to each other in a relationship, which although is moralistically wrong and a very post modernist thing to say as well as totally stereotyping, it has certain elements of truth within it. It is saying that people don’t need to get married to have a healthy relationship and getting married won’t make you happy. The interesting contrast is that in Sense and Sensibility, the thing that makes them all so happy is when they do all get married, but this could also be interpreted as the only way for the women to escape from what they have is to get married.

The traditional thoughts of what is Britishness within a film is usually rough, gritty, violent, cockney etc ... The majority of most famous British films have been those types of films such as Trainspotting, This is England, Snatch etc ... However with Sense and Sensibility and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they are British but at the other end of the spectrum. Much more of the middle / upper class area, where the most common British films are usually to do with social drama’s in the working class or underground cockney thug type films. The way these films maintain so much Britishness is a lot because of British actors, directors, authors, filmed in Britain and actually both films use a lot of the British countryside to set their scenes in, this for both films is using Mise En Scene but for different reasons. Sense and Sensibility is using the countryside filming because that’s the way people think of Britain over a hundred years ago, Britain was very much a more rural place. With Four Weddings and a Funeral it is because the British countryside is still very much associated with the upper classes which is where a lot of these weddings took place as they were being paid for by the more affluent member of society. It’s very interesting how in Four Weddings and a Funeral the way they send their message across to some degree is by using comedy. All the characters are very childish, but also using actors like Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) for a priest which is a very serious position in the church and very highly thought of, and turning the whole thing of marriage into a joke, shows that people do not always take it seriously these days and the point of it has to some degree gone away.

The ways the films are filmed are very different. Sense and Sensibility is quite a dark film because actually so many of the scenes are sort of negative scenes, they are very sympathetic scenes. Fanny, a character who is thoroughly disliked is not only wearing black lots of the time, but she is often also in dark scenes, or the lighting won’t be on her as much as it is on the other characters. But when Edward is playing with swords in the garden and also chatting to one of the young ladies in the library, the scenes are much lighter and happier. This is very different to Four Weddings and a Funeral as most of the scenes are bright, fast and upbeat. This is partly because it’s much more of a comedy film so it has to be, but it uses sounds much more than Sense and Sensibility to show the emotions of the characters. For instance when Hugh Grant is talking to the girl of his dreams when they bump into each other by accident, it’s the sound that makes the audience so in touch with the feelings of Hugh Grant.