The Pursuit of Love Review: Amazon’s Fizzy Period Drama is A Breath of Fresh Air

From Hulu’s The Great and AppleTV+’s Dickinson to feature films like The Favourite and Autumn de Wilde’s latest adaptation of Emma, recent period dramas have been reimagining what the historical genre can both be and do. These dramas, and others like them, leave staid, stuffy drawing rooms behind and embrace a more contemporary aesthetic and modern feel. 

Amazon’s new three-part series The Pursuit of Love is the latest entry in this growing trend — a series that’s set roughly in the same period as the later seasons of Downton Abbey but feels as though it hails from a different planet. Because though the show is titled The Pursuit of Love, it’s not necessarily the romance its title implies. 

Instead, the drama is a rich, stylish coming-of-age tale, an ode to the power of friendship, and a charming love letter to young women who dare to want more than society says they’re allowed, then or now. 

Based on Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel of the same name, The Pursuit of Love follows the story of die-hard romantic Linda Radlett (Lily James) and her far more practical cousin Fanny (Emily Beecham).

Linda is, as the kids today would say, extremely extra — a free spirit who longs to experience the world, fall in love, and escape the rule of her draconian father Matthew (Dominic West), who hates foreigners, doesn’t believe women should be educated, and hunts his own children with bloodhounds every Christmas.

Fanny, for her part, serves as the series’ narrator, and Linda’s lifelong wing woman. She tells the story of their lives with the sort of wry voiceover commentary that was omnipresent in Mitford’s original novel and her dry asides about various characters are a series’ highlight. (And often hilarious, to boot.)

Yet, the onscreen version of her character lacks much of this fire, and Fanny is often stuck playing the proverbial straight man to her best friend’s more dramatic fits of pique — or picking up the pieces in Linda’s wake as she engages in a series of ill-advised relationships and rebels against the rules established by society.

Part of Fanny’s general reticence, as well as her lifelong dedication to playing by the same rules that Linda disdains, is clearly the result of life growing up in the shadow of her mother’s disgrace.

Known among the family as “The Bolter,” Fanny’s mother is a cautionary tale amongst all Radcliffe relations, a living reminder of everything you’re not supposed to do or be. (The Bolter left Fanny when she was small and has spent her life since running through — and from — a series of relationships with varyingly disreputable men.) 

The story of The Pursuit of Love primarily focuses on Linda’s dramatic love life and her quest to feel everything as deeply and frequently as possible, a journey that takes her through two husbands, a brief dabble in Communism, and a stint as a glamourous Parisian mistress.

But at its heart, the series is about the friendship between these two women. No matter how often they fight or part, Fanny and Linda are drawn back together like magnets, each woman’s first and truest love no how many men may eventually cloud the picture. 

The series presents their lifelong relationship in all its complexity, from the jealousy each occasionally feels toward the other to their unerring loyalty to their bond. Their friendship is aspirational, co-dependent, and toxic by turns, and The Pursuit of Love is honest about the fact that much of their relationship is defined by the way they each fear and covet what the other has.

But despite anything that may happen between them, it’s clear that the two are lost without one another, and the yin-and-yang balance of their friendship is the heartbeat of the series.

Thankfully James and Beecham are more than up to the task, displaying a lovely chemistry together that feels full and balanced.

James has played this kind of role before, yet manages to shine as an effervescent, overly dramatic young woman who can’t help turning everything up to 11 at all times. (“It’s hard enough to kill a rabbit, let alone oneself”, she mournfully declares, after Fanny literally drags Linda off a window ledge.)

It’s no easy feat to make such a frequently selfish and self-interested character sympathetic, but James imbues Linda with a tragically manic glow, as though her nature requires her to simply feel things more intensely than everyone else.

Beecham has the more thankless task in a much less flashy role but is nonetheless equally adept, sympathetically playing Fanny’s desire for a conventional early 20th-century life as a wife and mother without setting her in opposition to Linda’s very different choices.

Her late-in-the-series attempt to shake up her own life falls flat because, at the end of the day, Fanny is deeply conventional and normal — but in the world of The Pursuit of Love that’s not a bad thing. The point is that women get to choose their fate, no matter where it leads them. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• It cannot be said often enough that this series is beautiful to look at. The clothes! The scenery! Everything! 
• The Pursuit of Love’s most modernist tendencies are on display in its first episode, which features the heaviest use of external commentary from narrator Fanny and fun visual tricks like the introduction of neighbor Lord Merlin by way of what is essentially a 1920s ballroom dance-off. 
• Andrew Scott is making something of a name for himself playing deeply neurotic weirdos, but his bizarre Lord Merlin — with his hand-dyed birds! — is one of his most charming roles. (I want Merlin to give me life advice, is what I’m saying.)
• Mitford wrote several novels about the Radcliffe clan, so I wonder if we might see a sister series about one of the other siblings at some point?
• Given that this is the project that spawned all that paparazzi coverage about an affair between Lily James and Dominic West, the fact that he plays her father is just…well, it’s a whole lot of ickiness that this series doesn’t deserve to have attached to it.

What did you think of The Pursuit of Love? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Pursuit of Love is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video

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