A radical approach to Austen

Mansfield Park (15) Selected cinemas

The first Jane Austen adaptation scripted and directed by a woman, Mansfield Park is the fourth feature film from Patricia Rozema, the adventurous Canadian director of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and White Room. Determined that her new film would not be "another Jane Austen garden party" dominated by period trappings, Rozema went back to Austen herself as she set about bringing the author's third and most autobiographical novel to the screen.

Rozema draws on Austen's own letters and journals to infuse the film - and the central character, Fanny Price - with the author's independence of spirit and sly sense of humour, while retaining much of the novel's scintillating dialogue which trips off the lips of a fine cast. Chief among them is the Australian actress, Frances O'Connor, who plays the title role in the BBC production of Madame Bovary which starts next month, and also stars in Gerry Stembridge's forthcoming Irish romantic comedy, About Adam.

She is wonderfully expressive as the grown-up Fanny Price, who at the age of 10, was taken out of her impoverished Portsmouth home to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park.

There, Fanny is regarded as an inferior, the poor relation, by all but her cousin, Edward (Jonny Lee Miller), who shares her passion for storytelling and admires her "voracious mind". Later, when Fanny attracts the attention of the charming but predatory Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola) and his sister, Mary (Embeth Davidtz), her status suddenly changes.

As Rozema's radical yet ultimately felicitous treatment of Austen's novel tackles its themes of repressed passion, class divisions and social hypocrisy, it pinpoints the issue of slavery, noting how the comfortable lifestyle of the Bertrams has been financed by the blood of slaves in Antigua. This draws Fanny into a confrontation with her patriarchal uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, who is played with oleaginous pomposity by the playwright, Harold Pinter, in this imaginative and emotionally charged film.