Are you a fan of “Bridgerton,” but wish it hadn’t clumsily acknowledged its color-blind casting with a nonsensical “one interracial romance solved racism forever” storyline? Then you’ll most definitely enjoy “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” a racially-inclusive, Jane Austen-esque period piece from director Emma Holly Jones and screenwriter Suzanne Allain, based on the latter’s novel and Black List script.
For the most part, “Mr. Malcolm’s List” is a straightforward, Regency-era rom-com, with young beautiful people torn between their desire for love and the societal pressure to marry the person with the biggest dowry and/or income, who somehow find a way to have their cake and eat it, too. But the film’s self-described color-conscious casting of Freida Pinto, Zawe Ashton, and Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù — enormously talented actors who most likely wouldn’t have appeared in a project like this prior to, say, 2010 — sets it apart from “Emma,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and the many iterations of “Pride and Prejudice.” So does its willingness to play with the tropes and expectations surrounding the typical Austen narrative: there’s no real villain in “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” for example, there’s a handsome, mustachioed man who turns out not to be a rake, and the ever-present servant characters are given real depth and (shocker!) actual opinions of their own.
As for the main characters, “Mr. Malcolm’s List” is the story of one very picky, very eligible bachelor and his quest to find a woman who checks all the boxes, literally. Mr. Jeremy Malcolm (Dìrísù) has a written list of requirements for a bride. She must have a forgiving nature, must be able to engage in intelligent conversation, must come from a respectable family, yada yada yada. When he rejects Julia Thistlewaite (Ashton), a clever young lady who isn’t overly interested in current events but is getting nervous after four seasons without finding a match, she decides to give him a taste of his own medicine. She enlists her longtime friend Selina Dalton (Pinto) to pose as Mr. Malcolm’s dream woman, make him fall in love with her, and dump him on the basis of not measuring up to her list.
Hijinks ensue, of course. And if you’ve seen any Austen adaptation or rom-com, you’ll know exactly where the story is going. But that doesn’t take away from “Mr. Malcolm’s List’s” charms, it only enriches them. The fact that this film is set in a utopia where racism and colonialism apparently don’t exist will, understandably, put some people off. But, in my eyes, “Mr. Malcolm’s List” is all about experimenting with the boundaries of period romances, from casting to creating characters who openly question the class system. The overall goal is still the same — for Miss Bennet to get together with her Mr. Darcy — but the journey is more delightful than ever.
“Mr. Malcolm’s List” is now in theaters. Jones and Allain previously collaborated on a short film version of “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” starring Pinto, Dìrísù, and Gemma Chan (“Eternals”).
