Besides Shakespeare, no author may haunt the screen more than Jane Austen. Her novels, full of heroines who find love and usually a life lesson or two, practically spawned the romantic comedy. So no wonder filmmakers have tackled copious direct adaptations of Austen’s novels — many of which are modern classics of cinema, like Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” and the six-part TV version of “Pride and Prejudice,” with its indelible scene of Mr. Darcy emerging from a pond in a wet shirt, ensuring generations of crushes on Colin Firth.
Yet Austen’s novels are timeless, and thus lend themselves to modernized spins, like “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Metropolitan,” “Clueless,” “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” and dozens more. And there are the meta-Austen tales, stories about loving Austen’s stories: “Austenland,” for instance, and “The Jane Austen Book Club.” The well of, and thirst for, Austenalia is seemingly bottomless.
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is not quite like any of those — more of a cousin from out of town, a little different, a little more intriguing. Written and directed by Laura Piani, it’s a rom-com laced lightly with “Pride and Prejudice” overtones, and it’s also a love letter to writing and reading, and to Austen, too. But there’s plenty going on here that is, if not entirely original, at least not straight from Austen.
Our heroine is the 30-something bookworm Agathe (a charming Camille Rutherford), who is French and lives in Paris, where she works at the storied English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company, having learned English from her father during her childhood. (Early scenes are shot in the real bookshop, which is a fun nugget for fans of the store.) The setup has the ring of familiarity: Her best friend Felix (Pablo Pauly, suitably impish) also works at the store, and the two are chummy and inseparable. You can feel a romance coming on, but the movie isn’t going to make it quite so easy for us or for them.
Agathe also dreams of being a writer, but something psychological is holding her back, and she’s at a bit of a standstill. The movie takes its time unpeeling those layers.
Things suddenly lurch into gear for Agathe when a prank results in her acceptance to the Jane Austen Writing Residency, in England. Intimidated but also a little pleased, Agathe gathers up her courage and goes to the residency where, upon her arrival, she meets the dour and pompous Oliver (Charlie Anson). It’s obvious to us he’s modeled on Mr. Darcy. He’s also, as it happens, Jane Austen’s great-great-grandnephew, but a somewhat ungrateful one: He much prefers contemporary literature to his relative’s work. Agathe and Oliver detest each other on sight, and also clearly feel a spark of mutual desire. The next few weeks will teach Agathe a lot about herself.
Piani’s screenplay for “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” walks a tricky line with mostly sure footing. It visibly fiddles with Austen’s romantic and narrative conventions, the ones that have been replicated across romantic comedies for a couple of centuries: awkward encounters, declarations of love, secondary characters invented for levity, passionate glances across a crowded room. That the movie is partly in French and partly in English adds extra possibilities for comedy — always make sure the person you’re complaining about on the phone doesn’t understand the language you’re speaking — and is a nice twice on the normally Anglophiliac subgenre.
Piani’s story also seems aware that the women Austen wrote about, with enough means to live fairly comfortably and take time for leisure pursuits, are going to encounter romance differently from their 21st-century compatriots. No matter how old-fashioned the heroine’s tastes and preferences are, she isn’t living, and can’t live, in Austen’s world.
Fewer family and class obligations exist to throw seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of her happiness. She doesn’t spend most of her time paying social calls in friends’ parlors or preparing for a busy social calendar of balls and trips to Bath. She works, and she moves freely, and she can have sex with more or less whoever she wants. She has, in other words, choice.
Yet a romantic comedy requires a choice-restricting hurdle or two to overcome. In Agathe’s case, they’re entirely in her head: her desire for one man or another, her ideas about romance and her self-sabotaging tendencies, as well as old hurts and traumas. Overcoming those takes work as well as some wise advice. Like many an Austen heroine, Agathe finds her moments of self-revelation to be tied up with emotional pain, but she’s also ready to trek through it toward her happy ending.
In the end, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise. Following in the footsteps of her beloved literary heroines, Agathe discovers a bit about real life outside of books — and not just romance, either. It is a universal truth: Sometimes to unwreck your own life, you’ve got to start acting like you’re the protagonist.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
Rated R for the kind of discussions of sex you’d never read in Austen, and a little bit of nudity. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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