Fatal flaw

I love the story of Jane Eyre more than life itself, which has never been much cop but, infuriatingly, I could not love this adaptation. I say ‘infuriating’ because what it does right it does very right. It is stunningly mounted, for example, with ferocious landscapes and howling winds and the sort of storms that split skies open. But what it does wrong is fatal, and the error is this: it just isn’t passionate or sexy enough. It is Jane Eyre with all the awful weather but minus the throb of erotic impulse. Jane and Rochester’s first kiss must, surely, be the most longed-for kiss in all of English literature — at last, a forbidden love expressed! — but when it happens here I did not feel a thing. I checked and double-checked but no, nothing. They might have been two strangers necking in a doorway. (Get a room!) I am still trying to figure out why and hope you will bear with me, even though it so rarely pays off.