Thirty years ago, the world was swooning over Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice adaptation … but all the time, the actual Jane Austen screen sensation that year was happening elsewhere in plain sight. Amy Heckerling’s high school romcoming-of-age masterpiece, inspired by Austen’s Emma, is now on re-release for its 30th anniversary and more than ever it feels like a complete joy, a deliciously movie-literate (and literate-literate) classic, with references to Stanley Kubrick, Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs to go with the Austen parallel.
Clueless is something to compare with Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story – and Alicia Silverstone’s final, tearful scene matches, and even outclasses, Julia Roberts’ speech in Notting Hill about being just a girl standing in front of a boy. Like Withnail and I, it’s a film which is composed entirely of quotable funny lines and for each rewatch fans could lip-sync along with the entire film. Maybe some of the material wouldn’t fly now – Cher’s body-image jokes (“I feel like such a heifer!”) are … of their time … but what contemporary movie has this level of sustained wit and fun?
