Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Stars: Camille Rutherford, Charlie Anson, Pablo Pauly
Writer/Director: Laura Piani
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
It’s been at least six months since the release of a movie inspired by the novels of Jane Austen, so of course we were long past due for a new one — and the fact that Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is so charming, so life-affirming, so unreasonably fresh, is a tribute not only to the filmmakers, but also to the enduring appeal of an author who last laid down her pen more than 200 years ago.
Camille Rutherford (Anatomy of a Fall) plays Agathe, an aspiring novelist and Jane Austen devotee who, along with her best buddy Felix (Pablo Pauly), co-owns the beloved Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. These two are playful pals of the Movieland sort — one of those couples who for years share their most intimate secrets and tease each other relentlessly, never for one second giving thought to the possibility that they might actually be attracted to each other in that way.
Agathe has written the first few chapters of a novel, but now she is hopelessly blocked. Felix, knowing she just needs a kick in the derriere, secretly submits her unfinished book to a Jane Austin fellowship program — which invites her to take up a two-week residence on a British estate.
Reluctantly, Agathe boards the ferry for England, but not before sharing an impulsive goodbye kiss with Felix, an act that makes the two of them wonder if, as Jane herself put it in Persuasion, “There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison.”
The moment she alights in Blighty, of course, all bets are off. Agathe is met at the pier by a veddy proper Brit named Oliver (Charlie Anson, who played Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and who could well be the love child of Hugh Grant and Benedict Cumberbatch).
Oliver’s first words to Agathe are, “I thought you’d be much older.” Minutes later, he informs Agathe — a woman who has modeled her entire life after Jane Austen’s heroines — that although he is, indeed, Austin’s great-great-great-great nephew, “I just think her work is a little overrated.”
They kind of hate each other. So, we know full well that pretty soon they’ll fall madly, irresponsibly in love with each other.
Agathe is one of those movie authors (I’ve never known one personally) who, when facing writer’s block, stares forlornly at her laptop screen for hours before angrily slapping it shut. She does this repeatedly in the movie’s course — especially whilst (Britishism there) agonizing over her newly discovered but already-divided affections for Felix and Oliver.
Things get even more dicey when Felix, now all romantic and moony, surprises Agathe with a visit just as things are heating up between her and Oliver.
You get the idea: Agathe, the world’s foremost Jane Austen enthusiast, finds herself living a Jane Austen romance on an Austen family estate with her very own Mr. Darcy.
Rutherford makes a perfect Austen woman: independent and smart, and somewhat in denial regarding her hopeless romanticism. The guys are appropriately smitten with her to just the right degrees. Writer/director Laura Piani, a noted French TV writer, manages to evoke the plush spirit of the Regency era without compromising the elements of a decidedly modern tale.
“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time,” complains the clergyman Edmund Bertram in Austen’s Mansfield Park. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life playfully and affectionately enumerates lots of those forms, in a time far removed from that of the woman whose timeless storytelling inspired it.
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