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A diet of romantic literature is a recipe for disappointment in real life, argues French director Laura Piani with “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” about an aspiring writer who’s convinced she was born in the wrong century, if only because she still believes in things like soulmates and courtship. Part homage, part referendum on all those love stories that make it look easy, Piani’s just-jaded-enough alternative fills the regrettable gap left by movies such as “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the Austen-inspired “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Sony Pictures Classics plans a limited release for May 23, going wide a week later.
At a time when practically the entire rom-com genre has gravitated to streaming, this bilingual theatrical offering from Sony Pictures Classics feels like the best kind of throwback. Presented as a lighthearted farce, complete with characters stepping (naked) through the wrong doors and a tense cross-country ride, in which Agathe complains in French (not realizing her companion speaks the language), the film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.
Blocked in both love and literature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is an exasperated Frenchwoman working at Shakespeare and Company, the adorably cluttered English-language bookstore situated just a few meters from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. According to Austen’s standards, Agathe — who identifies most closely with Anne Elliot in “Persuasion” — might seem at genuine risk of spinsterhood, having made it to her mid-30s without a prospect. It’s been years since she’s had so much as a kiss, and the hopeless singleton finds herself pouring all of her idealism and frustration into futile creative writing exercises until … inspiration strikes during a solitary dinner as she stares deep into a novelty sake cup.
Behind Agathe’s back, her encouraging (if frequently inappropriate) best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly) sends off the first few chapters of this new project to a writer’s residency at Austen’s former abode, hoping to give Agathe the “kick in the arse” she needs. Friendship, as Austen herself wrote, is “the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” The next thing she knows, Agathe is crossing the Channel to visit the author’s estate in Chawton. There, she spars with (but also falls for) one of the author’s distant relatives: Austen’s priggish great-great-great-grandnephew Oliver (Charlie Anson).
Piani shot practically the entire film in France, but it truly feels as if it has a foot in both cultures. Anson could be a young Rupert Everett’s bookish brother, and has clearly studied every wince and eye flutter in Hugh Grant’s arsenal, combining such tools into a 21st-century version of the Mr. Darcy archetype. From the frosty first encounter between Agathe and Oliver, in which she steps off the ferry and promptly retches on his loafers, audiences should find themselves rooting for these two to recognize how well matched they are.
But Agathe is wrestling with more than just her insecurities, as kissing Félix just before she took the ferry has stirred up newfound feelings for her old friend. Félix is a serial womanizer and a classic cad with whom she’s always felt a certain unexplored sexual tension, despite their many years of platonic companionship, and even in his absence, this development stands to complicate whatever she feels for Oliver. (Lest one doubt where viewers’ allegiances should lie, composer Peter von Poehl’s score practically quotes “Yumeji’s Theme” from “In the Mood for Love,” a romantic melody that’s all but impossible to resist.)
A few decades ago, a film like this might have had little chance of success competing with Hollywood-made rom-coms, but that steady stream has moved to, well, streaming, leaving a space wide open for audiences still looking to laugh and swoon at their local art house. As its almost defeatist title implies, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” has an intriguing relation to such escapism, recognizing that fiction in all its forms (whether literary or cinematic) has spoiled so many people’s expectations of what love can be.
Piani casts a slender, slightly gangly-looking actor to play Agathe. Rutherford is far from the dime-a-dozen ingénues so often seen in French movies, with their voluptuous figures and vacant expressions, looking simultaneously innocent and sexually enticing — and so much the better, as it sets an unrealistic standard for young women to aspire to, while casting them opposite gargoyle-like men. Instead, she excels at being awkward, weaving physical comedy (including pratfalls) into a role that doesn’t turn the head of every man she meets. Although Agathe is quite lovely in a less conventional way, Piani allows her intellect and personality to be the character’s most attractive traits.
All of Austen’s novels end with their characters headed toward the altar, but not this film, which doesn’t pretend that a seemingly well-matched marriage can lead only to happily ever after (George Eliot untangled that misapprehension in “Middlemarch”). Instead, it remains focused on the fate of Agathe’s writing career, ending with a near-perfect epilogue in which American documentary legend — and longtime Paris resident — Frederick Wiseman makes a cameo appearance. The movie may be intended to prick the illusions cast by frivolous love stories, but it whisks us away in a cloud of fantasy all the same, first to Paris, then to England, before returning us to something resembling the real world.
Maybe Austen wasn’t such a bad influence, for it was she who wrote, “Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience — or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”
