In her feature-length directorial debut, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, writer-director Laura Piani effervescently manages the tricky task of bringing the deep emotionality and light comic touch of Jane Austen’s endlessly adapted novels into the context of a contemporary rom-com. The film centers Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), a Parisian bookseller and aspiring writer who must break some ingrained self-protective habits when she’s unexpectedly offered a spot in the Jane Austen Residency, a writer’s retreat held in the idyllic English countryside and run by distant relatives of Austen. While Agathe’s personality and character arc are influenced by the pensive Anne Elliot of Persuasion — acknowledged as such by Agathe herself — her arrival at the residency places her in a Pride and Prejudice-inspired romance. Agathe initially dismisses Oliver (Charlie Anson), a professor of contemporary literature who has returned to his childhood home to help his aging parents run the residency, as arrogant and pretentious. Yet after a series of unplanned run-ins that show Oliver in a new light, she begins to fall in love
There is plenty to please Austen devotees in the film: Agathe reveres Austen and delivers several impassioned monologues in praise of her work, and Piani effectively integrates Austen’s plots and character types into the film’s contemporary setting. Piani also makes the smart decision to inflect Agathe with clumsiness and a tendency toward social faux pas, which — in addition to lending the otherwise leisurely paced film regular jolts of comic energy — will remind viewers of Bridget Jones, another contemporary Austenian heroine.
One might find Jane Austen Wrecked My Life to be over-burdened by unsubtle references and borrowed plot devices, and even beyond its invocation of existing works, the film has a general tendency toward cliché: most notably, Agathe’s discomfort with breaking out of her simple, constrained life as a bookseller and living with her sister stems from a traumatic accident, a tired plot device which isn’t treated with much complexity. Yet even the film’s clichés are forgivable, because Piani uses these reliable genre tropes as simple scaffolding for the warmly enveloping, finely composed character piece at its heart.
The lead performances from Rutherford and Anson (who bears a passing resemblance to a young Hugh Grant) are well-calibrated; both imbue their characters with the true romanticism needed to convincingly convey the love story, while playing their foibles and character flaws with equally necessary humor and lack of vanity. Visually, the film delivers consistent aesthetic pleasures. Director of Photography Pierre Mazoyer makes copious use of natural light, using sun-dappled spaces to cast a warm glow on the actors and finding texture and depth in shadows. The film’s indoor locations are filmed with an attention to detail that accentuates their inviting features, particularly in the well-appointed estate that houses the residency — one’s eye is drawn, for example, to the lace curtains, plush armchairs, and crackling fireplace of the living room where the writers gather each night. The overall aesthetic is one of down-to-earth romanticism that suits the escapist, but small-scale romance of the narrative.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life ultimately proves to be a well-crafted, comfortingly familiar romantic comedy, succeeding in both honoring Austen and standing on its own as a contemporary story of a woman finding not only romantic, but professional and personal fulfillment on her own terms. Piani has delivered the exact sort of broadly accessible and thoughtfully made “movie for adults” that has nearly disappeared from mainstream cinema in recent years.
DIRECTOR: Laura Piani; CAST: Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, Annabelle Lengronne; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: May 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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