Tag: Whit Stillman

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP – Review

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Film comedies packed witty, biting humor and whip-smart dialog are pretty rare these days. So LOVE & FRIENDSHIP, director Whit Stillman’s screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s lesser-known early short novel “Lady Susan,” is particularly welcome. With Kate Beckinsale shinning in the lead role as clever, ruthless Lady Susan, the witty comedy is even more delicious.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is pure fun, a brilliant comedy filled with laugh-out-loud moments and terrific ensemble performances by a largely British cast, making it entertaining even for those who are not big fans of Jane Austen or costume films.

Unlike other more familiar Austen works, LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is more comedy than romance, although there is some of that too. The story might be described as a comedy of manners but that label makes this very funny film sound more tame than it really is. The story is set in the 1790s, a little earlier than most Austen stories, and focuses on the mother more than the daughter, as Austen usually does.

Writer/director Whit Stillman (“The Last Days of Disco”) crafts Austen’s work into a sharp, zinger-filled, twisty romp, a far funnier, smarter comedy and a refreshing change from the typical comedies in theaters now.

Kate Beckinsale turns in one of her sharpest, funniest performances as Lady Susan. Since her husband’s death left her with a daughter and a noble title but insufficient funds, she has stayed with a string of better-off relatives. Sharp-witted Susan has a well-deserved reputation as an accomplished flirt and a woman who can wrap a man around her finger. Now that her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) has reached a marriageable age, Lady Susan is determined to find her a rich husband, and one for herself as well.

That is the plan when a touch of scandal, involving Susan’s married lover, the handsome Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearain), brings her to the quiet country estate, Churchill, of her late husband’s brother., where she hopes to hide out while gossip dies down. Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards) welcomes his sister-in-law but his  wife Catherine DeCourcy Vernon (Emma Greenwell), who has never met her before,  is more leery, as Lady Susan’s fearsome reputation for twisting circumstances to her advantage, particularly with men, precedes her.

Susan has her eye on Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), the handsome bachelor brother of her hostess. Catherine regards that possibility with suspicion and alarm, as do her parents, Lady DeCourcy (Jemma Redgrave) and Sir Reginald DeCourcy (James Fleet). Her husband Charles has a more kindly view of his brother’s widow.

Susan arrives at the estate with a friend, Mrs. Cross (Kelley Campbell), who assists her like a combination companion, lady’s maid and seamstress, although as she tells her hostess, it would be “offensive to us both” if she paid her.  However, Susan’s romantic plans are complicated when her daughter Frederica also arrives, tearfully fleeing the attentions of Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), the always-sunny but dull-witted wealthy aristocrat that her mother had selected as a suitable husband for her daughter. The very silly Sir James soon arrives as well, uninvited, and becomes another house guest.

Susan confides her frustration and plots to her close friend Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny), an American married to an English aristocrat, the “very respectable” Mr. Johnson (Stephen Fry). Their conversations allows us to see inside Susan’s Machiavellian plans. To make things a big more complicated, Mr. Johnson’s former ward is Lady Lucy Manwaring (Jenn Murray), the jealous, hysterical rich wife of Susan’s lover.

It may seem like a lot of characters to keep track of but Stillman’s well-crafted script and firm directorial hand keeping things running smoothly and makes keeping everyone straight easy. Of course, no one does this kind of story as well as Austen.

Unsurprisingly, the period costumes are gorgeous and perfect, and sets and locations are lush and lovely, as is the polished photography. The gracious beauty of the clothes and locations deliciously contrasts with the ruthless social maneuvering taking place, part of the humor.

Few complications are beyond Susan’s powers to turn to her advantage, although plots may not turn out exactly as planned. Beckinsale’s fast-talking Susan is a force of nature, who both lights up and transforms every room she enters, but really the whole cast is a dream, nailing each character perfectly so that the whole plot unfolds in hilarious precision.  Sevigny is particularly good as Susan’s confident, whose husband is alarmed by her wife’s friendship and threatens the unthinkable – leaving London for the wilds of Connecticut. Greenwell is very good as Catherine, appalled and intimidated by the relentless Susan. Samuel is also excellent as Reginald, who falls under Susan’s charms, and expresses the best shock at Sir James’ jaw-dropping witlessness. Bennett is wonderfully funny as the always happy, clueless Sir James. The ensemble cast works great as a clockwork whole.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is just great fun, a fast-paced and brilliant gem that is sure to enchant Austen fans and non-fans alike.

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP opens in St. Louis on May 27th, 2016

OVERALL RATING: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS

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Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novella “Lady Susan” Adapted In LOVE & FRIENDSHIP Film – Stars Kate Beckinsale And Chloë Sevigny

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LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is an adaptation of young Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan, believed to have been written in the mid 1790s but revised up to a fair copy prepared in 1805 and finally published by her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1871.

Kate Beckinsale on Lady Susan:

“A new Jane Austen is quite a find, I think. It’s quite exciting to find something that people are not necessarily familiar with, either the trajectory of the story, or the characters.

“The thing about the Lady Susan Vernon character is that, unusually for romantic literature, at the core she’s not a very good person. And yet, she’s celebrated in the novella. It is extraordinarily well written and well observed and well drawn.

“This is an epistolary novel and it has its own difficulties in adapting. Lady Susan doesn’t have the same kind of reflection as Emma has, or self-analysis.”

For Austen fans, this is very exciting. Director Whit Stillman says, “Seeing an adaptation of Jane Austen’s early (and not-truly-finished) novella concerning the clever and triumphant Lady Susan Vernon gives hope of adding another Austen volume to the shelf of her great mature works – now in film form.”

Check out the brand new trailer.

Beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon visits to the estate of her in-laws to wait out the colourful rumours about her dalliances circulating through polite society.

Whilst ensconced there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and a future for her eligible but reluctant daughter, Frederica.

In doing so she attracts the simultaneous attentions of the young, handsome Reginald DeCourcy, the rich and silly Sir James Martin and the divinely handsome, but married, Lord Manwaring, complicating matters severely.

Catherine Vernon (nee DeCourcy) describes Lady Susan, per Jane Austen:

“She is really excessively pretty… I have seldom seen so lovely a Woman as Lady Susan. She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes & dark eyelashes; & from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five & twenty… I cannot help feeling that she possesses an uncommon union of Symmetry, Brilliancy, & Grace. Her address to me was so gentle, frank, & even affectionate, that, if I had not known how much she has always disliked me for marrying Mr. Vernon… I should have imagined her an attached friend… Her Countenance is absolutely sweet, & her voice & manner winningly mild. I am sorry it is so, for what is this but Deceit?”

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English novelist, biographer and critic Margaret Drabble says of Jane Austen:

There are some great writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine….

[Lady Susan was written in the period of the mid-1790s] when Jane Austen was about to start working on her first version of Sense and Sensibility, which was called Elinor and Marianne, and which was also, like Lady Susan, written in letter form. She was about this stage twenty years old.

Clearly, she liked Lady Susan well enough to make a fair copy of it, and not well enough to pursue its publication. Perhaps she was thinking of publication when she copied it, but none of her novels appeared until 1811, and by that point she may well have become dissatisfied with it again.

One could reasonably conjecture that one of her dissatisfactions sprang from the form in which she chose to write it. The letter form of the novel had been popular in the eighteenth century, and was very much a living convention when she tried to use it, but it did not really suit her talents — witness the fact that the second draft of Sense and Sensibility was in the third-person style of narration which she was to use from then on. The letter form is an artificial convention, and she felt its limitations: stylistically, she was a far from conventional writer, and as Virginia Woolf pointed out, she had the courage and originality to find he own way of expressing herself — her own subject matter, her own plots, her own prose. She admired Richardson greatly, all of whose works are written in letters, and she enjoyed Fanny Burney, but their method does not come naturally to her: she points out in her Conclusion, ‘This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer,’ which indicates her sense of unreality in keeping the game up….

LOVE & FRIENDSHIP was an Official Selection of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival ‘Premiere’ Category.

Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions will release LOVE & FRIENDSHIP in theaters on May 13, 2016.

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