Entertainment / “Mr. Malcolm’s List” Shows Us A Different Side Of Freida Pinto

“Mr. Malcolm’s List” Shows Us A Different Side Of Freida Pinto

Entertainment Jul 01, 2022

by Matthew Currie

Freida Pinto (@freidapinto) stars in the new romantic comedy Mr. Malcolm’s List. Set in early 19th-century England, this frothy mix of Bridgerton and Jane Austen casts Freida as Selina Dalton, a woman who helps her jilted friend take revenge on a picky suitor through an elaborate matchmaking hoax.

Following in the zeitgeist-grabbing footsteps of Netflix’s Bridgerton, Mr. Malcolm’s List arrives in North American cinemas this weekend, delivering a romantic comedy of errors that wears its Jane Austen on its sleeve. While nowhere near as sexually provocative as Bridgerton, the film does adopt the same colour-blind approach to casting, filling the central roles with mostly BIPOC performers — a decision that, beyond just striking another blow for representation on screen, injects some freshness into a narrative that, if not stale, is certainly very familiar to fans of Regency-era British rom-coms.

Mr. Malcolm 1 — **“Mr. Malcolm’s List” Shows Us A Different Side Of Freida Pinto: Freida Pinto as Selina Dalton and Sope Dirisu as Jeremiah Malcolm in a winningly Austen-esque romantic dramedy.** Photo Credit: Bleecker Street

Adapting her own 2009 novel, screenwriter Suzanne Allain and director Emma Holly Jones take us back to 19^th-century England, where the aristocracy’s most eligible, enigmatic bachelor, Jeremiah Malcolm (Sope Dirisu), has set tongues a-wagging by briefly dating and then rejecting the lady Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), who is, by the standards of the day, rapidly approaching “old maid” status.

It turns out, Mr. Malcolm has a list of qualifications that any potential bride must meet, and Julia just didn’t measure up. Mortified and scandalized, she enlists her cousin Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) — an acquaintance of Malcolm’s who’s actually gotten a glimpse at the man’s mysterious list — and her old finishing-school friend Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto) to get revenge. Their scheme: use Cassidy’s knowledge of Malcolm’s exacting standards to position Selina as the suitor’s perfect match, only to pull the rug out and publicly humiliate him in kind. Naturally, as this sham courtship progresses, true romance begins to blossom — further complicated by the appearance of another suitor or two (including Theo James, recent veteran of PBS’s smash-hit Jane Austen adaptation, Sanditon).

Malcolm 2 — **“Mr. Malcolm’s List” Shows Us A Different Side Of Freida Pinto: Zawe Ashton as vengeful bachelorette Julia Thistlewaite.** Photo Credit: Bleecker Street

It’s an ideal ensemble. And many of the actors are, in fact, reprising their roles from a 2019 digital short that serves as a prequel to this feature — the notable exception being Zawe Ashton, who replaces original Julia Thistlewaite-portrayer Gemma Chan. Ashton brings an irresistible charm to a character who in less capable hands could come off as vain and vapid. Dirisu, meanwhile, is perfectly, sexily aloof (like any proper Austen leading man) — his titular List betraying arrogance on one hand, but also an endearing dedication to finding a true partner as opposed to just a mate. And then of course, there’s Pinto, who in addition to playing Selina, also served as an executive producer on the original short film. She’s a performer who thrives on elegance and earnestness, and this role makes perfect use of both, albeit redeployed in a setting that represents relatively uncharted territory for the Slumdog Millionaire breakout.

Though perhaps lacking the exquisite profundity of Austen’s best work, Mr. Malcolm’s List is a fun, frothy, irreverent tale helmed by a writer, director and cast who have a firm grasp of their genre.

Mr. Malcolm’s List is in theatres now.

Main Image Photo Credit: Bleecker Street

Matthew Currie

Author

A long-standing entertainment journalist, Currie is a graduate of the Professional Writing program at Toronto’s York University. He has spent the past number of years working as a freelancer for ANOKHI and for diverse publications such as Sharp, TV Week, CAA’s Westworld and BC Business. Currie ...

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“Mr. Malcolm’s List” Shows Us A Different Side Of Freida Pinto

by Matthew Currie

Matthew Currie

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