It is perhaps the moment at which she secures his respect, and all else follows from there.

And when Rochester arrogantly wants to know what her 'tale of woe' is – because all governesses have one – Wasikowska coolly shows just how fatuous, condescending and misjudged Jane considers this remark to be. His teasing and raillery are perhaps romantically sincere, or perhaps it is all just the absent-minded petting and stroking he would give to a much-loved horse that he is nonetheless considering selling or shooting. Wasikowska shows how Jane is suspicious of his gentleness and the emotions it unlocks within her. Fassbender's grumpy rebukes are stonewalled by Jane's proudly polite submission, a defence she also puts up against his scary avowals of affection. He simmers and smoulders and sometimes grins like a very sexy alligator, but never does anything as banal as flirt. Michael Fassbender plays Rochester with a measured, observant intensity which mirrors Wasikowska's Jane. This is the glowering, charismatic and secretly tortured Mr Rochester, that extraordinary creation who is ancestor of Daphne Du Maurier's Maxim De Winter and second cousin to Count Dracula. But she is to be not the mistress but rather the pupil, of sorts, to the master of the house. Orphaned, cruelly treated as a child, beaten and humiliated, Jane has endured a brutal boarding school run with lavish Christian hypocrisy, and finally fetches up as a governess in Thornfield Hall, a remote house in the Yorkshire Peak District, teaching a precocious little French girl, a position that showcases Jane's fluent and idiomatic command of the language. The plot is configured in flashback form. But like many Hollywood stars for whom Britspeak is not the mother tongue, this is achieved with slowness and control. Her north country accent, incidentally, is far superior to Anne Hathaway's. Wasikowska carries off the bonnets and the middle-parting and fiercely self-deprecatory references to her own plainness as only a sensationally beautiful film star can. Twenty-one-year-old Australian-born Mia Wasikowska gives a self-possessed performance in the leading role: her Jane addresses the audience and her employer with the same limpid, even gaze. C ool, temperate, finely wrought, this new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is enclosed in a crinoline of intelligent good taste.

Jane eyre movie