In the first year of the third decade of the twenty-first century, when the fin de siècle vogue seemed to be over, two new Jane Austen films appeared: Sanditon, a BBC mini-series made for the small screen (aired in Britain the previous year), and Emma., a feature designed for the big one. Based on very different Austen texts, one a sketch for a novel she died before completing and the other the most complex of her six masterpieces, neither was strictly speaking an adaptation.

Andrew Davies, the author of the six-part 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice that is still marketed as “the most successful TV period drama ever,” wrote the script for Sanditon, which elaborates on Austen’s skeletal story, enriching it with kinky sub-plots and sexy shots. In his hands, the tale of Charlotte Heywood’s seaside encounter with the large hypochondriacal Parker family lost a few Parkers and acquired more “adult” content, including male frontal nudity, brother-sister incest, and traumatic child abuse. Davies, born in 1936, had sexed up Jane Austen before, not only in his breasts-up Pride and Prejudice but also in a 2008 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for television that deliberately competed with the big-screen Emma Thompson–Ang Lee version of 1995.

The new Emma., in contrast, was written by Eleanor Catton (born in 1985), a prize-winning New Zealand novelist. It is the first film directed by Autumn de Wilde, an American photographer evidently known for her music videos. It is lavish, engaging, and cute, like every adaptation of Austen’s novel about the matchmaking heroine who finds love herself, next door. These include Amy Heckerling’s brash Clueless (1995), set in twentieth-century Hollywood, and the two period dramas that were released the following year, one starring Gwyneth Paltrow and the other with Kate Beckinsale. De Wilde’s film aims to one-up those by astonishing. “Behold a new vision of Jane Austen’s comedy,” the trailer commands, following an opening shot set in church (where Jane Austen never set a scene), where Bill Nighy’s cranky but dapper Mr. Woodhouse objects to the clergyman’s pronunciation of “innocence.” De Wilde, the auteur of Emma., archly explained to the press that the period at the end of the title of her film identifies it as a period piece.