Like a real life Jane Austen story for this lonely writer.
It was such fun for me to make some pretzel candies, while watching “Pride & Prejudice,” which has celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. It’s also fun for me to watch “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a movie made for people who either love Jane Austin’s work or are entering her world of romances whether they’re supposed to be happy or sad.
A lot of the actors in this movie are lesser known (so, no Kiera Knightleys nor Emma Thompsons), but if you have heard about this movie and listen to my advice, then you will know these actors in the future. And we also haven’t heard of the writer and director Laura Piani, but I just learned she studied film and literature in Paris and Rome, and she has received acclaim for her short film “Prudence Ledoux a le vent en poupe.” So, I think the movie should allow the audience to get acquainted with these new names.
We meet Agatha Robinson (Camille Rutherford from “Blue is the Warmest Color” and “Anatomy of a Fall”), a lonely bookseller in Paris, who is currently writing a book while suffering from writer’s block. Much to her dismay, her co-worker and potential boyfriend Felix (Pablo Pauly from “The French Dispatch”) sends her first few pages to the Jane Austen Writers’ Residency in England. But the hosts are delighted by her literature enough to invite her for a writer’s retreat.
There’s a new potential suitor in Agatha’s stay, and that would be the literary professor Oliver (Charlie Anson from “Death On the Nile” and by a strange coincidence, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), who also happens to be Austen’s great-great-great-great grandnephew. It would be ironic that he thinks his ancestor’s work is overrated, and yet, he teaches literature. Even Agatha is perplexed by that.
One of the innkeepers, Todd (Alan Fairbairn), has dementia, which basically gives him permission to not wear pants in the garden or pouring water on a critical writer. These segments are funny and honest, and there’s also some eccentricity in his wife Beth (Liz Crowther), who also speaks French and believes in the courage and potential inside Agatha.
We very little out of the other writers, who are too busy to get acquainted with the main heroine and the audience. But we are able to see “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” as a romcom that knows the meaning of the words “romance” and “comedy,” it knows who the writer is and the characters created by her, and it knows who the target audience is supposed to be. Rutherford is delightful and consistent, as she plays a heroine worthy of Jane Austen’s standards, and Anson and Pauly are respectively entertaining without trying so hard to be her final suitor. There’s no awkwardness nor cliches riddled between them, and I guess that’s what’s soothing.
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is certainly more French and English and entertaining than the new film version of Francoise Sagan’s “Bonjour Tristesse,” which needed more authenticity and less cliches. Sony Pictures Classics, which distributes this film, shared a special screening with movie-goers at a movie theater in Red Bank. I was one of the people in attendance, and I ran into some friends who asked me if I saw the trailer. And I told them: for some movies, I usually take my grandfather’s advice of letting the movie surprise me. And I was surprised by the film’s passion and exuberance.
Time for my obligatory Austen puns. If you have any “Sense & Sensibility,” then you’ll take my “Persuasion,” and see this movie, which is full of “Love & Friendship.” I know they probably sound corny, but I like to be as eccentric as the film itself.
In Select Theaters Friday
Expands Nationwide Next Week