FILM REVIEW
JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE
Rated R
98 Minutes
Released May 30th
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a refreshingly simple and genuine story of friendship, loneliness and love – no breathtaking cinematography, no exotic locales, no fights, fire, bombs, no scandal, In spite of lacking all that, this film brings you people you can identify with, whose lives, relationships, hardships and tragedies will reach out to you.
The title has a better ring in the original French: “Jane Austen a gache ma vie (pronounced gashay). The dialogue is in both French and English, and for US audiences, the French is subtitled. On a YouTube review, the language is described as “Frenglish,” as the characters interweave the two languages with ease. Linguistically insular US audiences had already found they could be comfortable volleying between the two languages while watching Emily in Paris on Netflix.
“Agathe,” played beautifully by relatively unknown Camille Rutherford, is the center of the story. She is a struggling writer who works in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Despite having a secret, whimsical side, she is outwardly an introvert who keeps her thoughts to herself. Her solitary life is wrapped in novels and stories by great authors. “Literature is like an ambulance speeding through the night to save someone,” she says. She also notes that “Some books become part of our lives because they reveal our true nature.” Her friend “Felix” (Pablo Pauly) submits one of her drafts for a coveted spot at the Jane Austen Residency in England, and, to her surprise, she is accepted.
When she arrives, she is greeted by a Jane Austen heir, “Oliver,” who becomes a romantic influence. Agathe’s complex character is revealed slowly as the story unfolds and she finds love for life, for writing, and for romance. By the end, you feel you can see the depths of her soul. She is looking for that elusive inspiration, and finds it in a series of events, or you might even say non-events. Rutherford skillfully shows the subtle changes in Agathe’s emotions as she navigates from a lost soul to finding passion, life, and for a soulmate.
Although Agathe at first stiffly holds in her emotions, Rutherford has a dancer’s command of her movements and is able to show Agathe’s inner spirit. A budding, messy romance with two men that she believes interferes with her work, later provides a needed jump start. And Agathe’s struggle to form the words to express the emotions percolating in her psyche becomes a third relationship in this story.
The story has some parallels to Jane Austen herself, who lived from 1775 to 1817, and with her work, which examines the strict mores of the British landed gentry of the period with realism, social commentary, irony, and wit. In this film, Agathe is afraid to let anyone read her work. For Jane Austen, it was improper in her era for a young lady to be an author, so any work that her publisher brother printed for her was anonymous.
Her name was not attached to any of her novels, and her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was signed “By a Lady.” Her identity was only revealed by her brother after her death via a biographical intro he wrote for one of her works. She was likely quite tall for her time, 5’6”-5’8,” and Rutherford, who plays the heroine in this movie, is tall. Agathe, who is thirtysomething, would have been considered an “old maid” in Austen’s time, and Austen herself never married, though there are hints that she had a long-distance love relationship with an Irishman.
French Director Laura Piani, who also wrote the screenplay, noted that Austen never described her characters in her novels as other authors did, so the reader can use their imagination. Inspired by Austen’s life and works, Piani did a deep dive into Austen’s life to make this film, only her third as a director. She went to the cottage that Austen shared with her sister and their mother at their brother’s estate in England and saw Austen’s desk. She pulled together an extraordinary cast of relatively unknown actors who make the characters come alive: Rutherford as Agathe, Charlie Anson as Oliver, and Pauly as Felix. Anson and Pauly both capture a wonderful subtlety in their characters, which helps make this movie refreshingly romantic in a modern way.
The story of this movie may be familiar, but the characters are fascinatingly imperfect. It’s important that this movie opens in a bookshop and is based on a legendary author. According to one report, there is a “new wave of literature lovers opening pop-up shops and brick-and-mortar locations…” Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, says, “I don’t think any of us would have predicted that a few years ago.” Jane Austen herself would have been proud to have her name attached to this film and would laugh at the irony of her name being part of the title. It is easy to believe that if she were alive today, she could have written the screenplay herself.
Kathryn Whitney Boole has spent most of her life in the entertainment industry, which has been the backdrop for remarkable adventures with extraordinary people. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. kboole@gmail.com
