Film - Jonathan Romney on why steamy is unseemly in the latest Austen adaptation

The poster blurb for Mansfield Park proclaims this to be "the newest and steamiest Jane Austen adaptation". And just how steamy, pray, ought an Austen adaptation to be? These days, we're used to them being passably torrid, ever since Mr Darcy's wet-shirted swim in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice - a version based partly on the proposition that its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, should be, as the adapter Andrew Davies put it, "wonderful in bed".

Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park similarly proposes a world in which almost everyone is hot to trot. It's also very much a revisionist rewrite: Rozema has described the story in flatly modern terms as being about "a dysfunctional family with an absentee slave-trader father". Mansfield Park is famously the novel that many Austenites dislike, for which special excuses have to be made, largely because of the intractably dry figure of Fanny Price. She is the timid poor relation brought to live with the rich Bertrams and treated as their inferior, but who, through self-denial and firmness of character, becomes the household's moral centre. Alternatively, she is simply a tight-arsed bore.

A film that manages to make a compelling heroine out of that Fanny would be a complex one indeed, but that's not the path taken by Rozema, the Canadian director whose films I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and When Night is Falling are rather arch fables of lesbian self-affirmation. Rozema remakes Fanny as a tough, sprightly minx, and weaves in extracts from Austen's own letters and journals in order to replace Fanny the desiccated wallflower with Fanny the dashing literary ironist.

Frances O'Connor is very good in the role: brisk, mischievous and even convincing when she is giving wry conspiratorial looks to camera. This Fanny is wont to storm boldly out of arguments and go riding in the rain. Dashing in black with a white collar, she looks in one scene like a cross between a bluestocking Byron and a sparky Angela Brazil prefect.

Here, Fanny's moral probity is restricted to being rather less of a sexpot than everyone else. The real hot numbers are the glamorous Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, who, as played by Alessandro Nivola and Embeth Davitz, fairly crackle with libertine glamour. They don't just crackle: Henry eventually gets his bout of bare-bottom rampancy, and Mary turns suavely Sapphic as she helps Fanny out of her wet clothes. When the Bertrams and Crawfords rehearse their amateur dramatics, the heaving loucheness is like backstage at the Hellfire Club.

Rozema also underlines, rather heavy-handedly, the reading that Edward Said and other critics have made more or less standard: Mansfield Park as a story about slavery. From a wind-lashed cliff, Fanny sees a slave ship out at sea and hears distant voices raised in African song: the crassly Spiel-bergian touch is a beautifully arranged number specially written by a Malian pop star, Salif Keita. When the Bertrams' dissolute son Tom falls ill, the real cause appears to be trauma induced by horrors witnessed in Antigua. Sure enough, Fanny finds Tom's book of sketches, which depict Sir Thomas (a grimly monolithic Harold Pinter) looming over his slaves like Simon Legree: they look like storyboards for Mandingo or some such 1970s plantation melodrama. Just to make it clear where we are to stand on the matter, there's this juicy exchange: "The abolitionists are making inroads." "That's a good thing, isn't it?"

The film goes really off the rails when Fanny visits her impoverished family in Plymouth. The place isn't just shabby-genteel, but crawling with maggots. Lindsay Duncan plays both Fanny's rich, spoilt aunt and her poor, cadaverous mother - a literal-minded illustration of what different social conditions can do to people. It is even suggested between the lines that her father is a brutal child molester: this is not a film that is soft on patriarchs.

You want to cry out, as Mary archly does in this version: "This is 1806, for heaven's sake!" Rozema's film, all superior 1990s hindsight, feels like an A-level gloss designed to make the story "relevant" to audiences more socially and sexually enlightened than poor Austen could have been. All Rozema does is elide the book's difficulties by painting over them with unsubtle glamour.

I admit I'm hard to please when it comes to literary adaptations. I get edgy if I feel a film is selling short a complex book; but then, if it's too faithful, I'm likely to complain that it ought to engage more critically with the text. Still, I'm always open to persuasion. A recent modernisation of the 17th-century La Princesse de Cleves very plausibly had the heroine fall for a Portuguese rock star. Conversely, the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility was an object lesson in bringing Austen alive through scrupulous fidelity. But there is something at once gauche and presumptuous in Rozema's undertaking to rescue both Fanny and Austen from the restrictive conventions of their day. A bit of swagger is very fine in its place, but Mansfield Park probably isn't the place. As Austen herself once said - and might have said again on seeing her shrinking Price girl become a proto-Spice Girl - "What is become of all the shyness in the world?"

Mansfield Park (15) is on release nationwide

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