Jane Austen, who used dialogue as a veil that
reveals and conceals, and writer-director Whit
Stillman (Metropolitan), with his love for the
elegant pensée, are such an obvious match that
you wonder why it took them this long to get
together. Love & Friendship, Stillman’s acerbic
adaptation of the Austen novella Lady Susan, gets
closer to the author’s snap and spirit than most of
her film adaptations of recent decades. The film
is stately, but not in that luxe cream-coloured
showroom way; the rooms are dark-toned,
bathed in shadow. And the people who move in
and out of them proclaim their agendas with a
brittle deviousness that’s more Dangerous
Liaisons than Emma. That’s the film’s appeal, but
also its challenge: Love & Friendship is not a
romantic comedy dressed in breeches and ruffles.
It could just as well have been called Money &
Coercion. It taps into the side of Austen that saw
love as something that many – if not most –
women simply couldn’t afford.
To put it in vulgar movie terms: Xavier Samuel
is the closest thing here to a ‘Hugh Grant
character’
The central character is Lady Susan Vernon
Martin, a widow of diminishing means played with
high duplicitous verve by Kate Beckinsale. Lady
Susan is a manipulator of such tart-tongued
intricacy that when she’s on screen, you spend
half the time enjoying her amoral flippancy and
the other half trying to figure out what exactly it is
she’s after. Lady Susan arrives at Churchill, the
country mansion of her in-laws, where her first
task is to deceptively, flirtatiously dispel any
notion that she is a deceptive flirt. She cultivates
an alliance with Reginald DeCourcy, who at first
seems a natural match for her. To put it in vulgar
movie terms: he’s the closest thing here to a
‘Hugh Grant character’, and Xavier Samuel plays
him as softly cutting in a debonair way.
Pride and prevarications
But Lady Susan, while she declares affection for
Reginald, is really just using him, the same way
she uses everyone. When her daughter, the
radiant Frederica (Morfydd Clark) shows up from
school, Lady Susan has a ghastly match in store
for her: Sir James, who is wealthy, kind, and the
sort of jaw-dropping buffoon who could only be
produced by generations of moneyed indolence.
He’s played by Tom Bennett in a performance
that provokes some chuckles (especially when Sir
James discusses “the Twelve Commandments”)
but that I wish gave the character another layer
or two. Bennett flashes his teeth like Michael Palin
in an old Monty Python sketch. He’s funny, but in
the end there’s nothing to him.
Stillman has taken his liberties with Austen’s
story
The luscious amusement of Beckinsale’s
performance is that Lady Susan lies as casually as
she breathes (“Facts are horrid things!” she
proclaims), but the way she lies is to spin out such
an eloquent smokescreen of curlicued literacy
that no one following her to the end of her
sentences could possibly think they’re
misrepresenting reality. Even the audience gets
fooled.
Stillman, who famously referenced Jane Austen in
Metropolitan, knows this world of comfort and
the boredom, in which manners can mask the
shabbiest behaviour. But in Love & Friendship, he
also packs a few too many complications into 90
minutes. Lady Susan, an early Austen work
published after her death, is far from a seamless
manuscript, and Stillman has taken his liberties
with it, leaving crucial encounters in the
background and tweaking the ending into
something so playful and modern that the
audience does a double-take as the end credits
are rolling. He has every right to play with the
material in this way; it’s not as if the warm-and-
fuzzy Austen adaptations of the ‘90s were always
so authentic. But those movies had a way of
letting viewers wish that they could live in that
time. Love & Friendship musters some of that
period delight but spikes it with a cynical flair that
puts any hint of wide-eyed idealism in its place.
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