This layering is kept up throughout, with a tour de force in the ball, where a seemingly seamless eye goes all over the building, capturing glances at people we know and those we don't. Any movie only has a few moments to introduce itself and tell you how the visual world will be constructed and this does it well. Then we leave her and enter the house and noodle around a bit, always still with layers, then wander to a window where we see her passing by behind the house. The opening scene introduces this to us, a wonderful sequence worthy of Welles, as we follow our girl down the road over a bridge behind laundry to the house. Nearly every shot is structured with at least two layers, with things happening both in foreground and background. I credit the producers for specifying the technique. I don't know this director, but he is from TeeVee so obviously is inexperienced in these matters. How to introduce this notion of a second flowing layer without changing the story? Why you do it cinematically.

We have already many ways of 'folding' in films, but they mostly require structure in the story itself. The challenge comes in how to handle the layers. There is a context, but it is there only to provide lushness and decoration, not fate. Past P&P projects have used the Merchant and Ivory approach which just takes the people alone. So converting Austen to film is a challenge, indeed, but only if you want to capture Austen's magic. The other great invention was devising a narrative style that sometimes centered on the people and sometimes on their containing world, using the one to poke sly fun at the other. The two interact at times (and much is made of these turning points) but usually the two are layered one on top of the other, shifting dominance as they go. The first was in building two parallel narratives: one of individuals bumping into each other and the other of grander forces of life and society.

The way an idea appears has more effect than the idea itself, and so with images as well. Or so it would be after Jane Austen invented the novel. Stories are there as frames on which all the meaningful stuff is draped. When that story appears in a film relatively unaltered, purists rejoice. I'm amazed at how many people think of books as being encompassed by their stories.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen