Love & Friendship, 2016.
Directed by Whit Stillman.
Starring Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel and Stephen Fry.
SYNOPSIS:
Set in the 1790s, Love and Friendship centers on beautiful widow Lady Susan Vernon, who has come to the estate of her in-laws to wait out colorful rumors about her dalliances circulating through polite society. Whilst there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and her rather reluctant debutante daughter, Frederica.
Those who dread the prospect of yet another Jane Austen movie frock fest would do well to be pointed in the direction of Love & Friendship, director Whit Stillman’s deliciously acerbic Regency romp in which the clothes and decor support the satire, not vice versa. Too often, Austen adaptations are cosseted, corseted and more than a little bland; under Stillman’s typically deadpan direction, the author’s deliciously spiky sense of humour is joyously restored.
Not only is the reputation of the Jane Austen adaptation redeemed: Stillman’s movie also offers a plum role to Kate Beckinsale, quite possibly the finest of her career to date and one that makes us lament her toiling in leather-clad drivel like the Underworld movies. This is the second time the director and actress have worked together, the last being 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, and the collaboration reaches new heights here with Beckinsale’s role as the wonderfully catty Lady Susan Vernon, both antagonist and protagonist of the epistolary, unfinished Austen novella on which the film is based (and which Stillman was compelled to complete for the purposes of his screenplay).
Broadly speaking, the plot perambulates around familiar Austen territory. Having recently lost her husband, although seemingly grieving even less than she would over a dropped stitch, Lady Susan decides to pay an extended visit to the Churchill estate of her sister-in-law Catherine (Emma Greenwell) and the latter’s husband Charles (Justin Edwards). An expert schemer and manipulator, Lady Susan is the black widow at the centre of her own rapidly expanding web, a woman whose duplicitious manner and attractive looks have no problem hooking in male suitors.
Before long, she finds herself being courted by Catherine’s handsome, upstanding younger brother Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel), only for the situation to become complicated when Susan’s daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) arrives at Churchill having run away from school. Sensing the imminent attraction between her offspring and the eligible Reginald, Susan responds by attempting to pair up her daughter with oafish ‘rattle’ (in other words, idiot) Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett, proving himself the film’s scene-stealer), a man so dunderheaded he views peas as a revolutionary kind of vegetable.
The mainstay throughout all of Susan’s machinations is her American accomplice Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny, another Stillman regular), whose own association with the gossip-courting Susan threatens to see her carted back across the Atlantic on the orders of her husband (Stephen Fry). In a flash of the movie’s typically coruscating wit, Susan observes of her friend’s dour spouse: ‘He’s too old to be governable, too young to die.’
Right from the droll, closed-captioned introductions to the story’s various characters, it’s clear Stillman is having an absolute blast transposing his characteristic dry wit to the period setting. Despite having only made four movies in his career to date the Austen influence has always been readily apparent, a love of social mores (and their dissection) having coursed throughout his career from 1990 debut Metropolitan to 2011 comeback Damsels in Distress. The progression onto Austen herself therefore feels like a natural one, a perfect marriage of director and material that is a feast for the senses.
Yet no matter how impressive the glittering costumes by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, the sumptuous production design by Anna Rackard or the sleek cinematography by Richard Van Oosterhout, this is no flippant exercise in style but a supple and slippery comedy of manners in which our allegiance towards our central character is always in doubt. Indeed towards the end of his self-penned climax, the director throws in an unexpectedly amusing twist that is a classic example of shattering our expectations.
Yet Stillman is also able to find the moral heart of the piece: in typical Austen style, Frederica and Reginald are the relative innocents whose happiness we want to see guaranteed, but who stand to lose the most from Susan’s endless scheming. That we end up caring for the story’s moral characters as well as laughing at its more grotesque inhabitants demonstrates Stillman’s cast-iron grip on the material. Led by Beckinsale’s outstanding lead performance, sardonic wit rolling off the tongue as if it were her lifeblood, it’s an unusually bracing venture into territory with which we’re now all-too-familiar.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Sean Wilson is a film reviewer, soundtrack enthusiast and avid tea drinker. If all three can be combined at the same time, all is good with the world.
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