Review: Love & Friendship

Love & Friendship (U)

Ireland/Netherlands/France/USA 2016  93 mins  Dir: Whit Stallman  Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenwell, Tom Bennett, Morfydd Clark, Jemma Redgrave, Stephen Fry, James Fleet, Justin Edwards

A Jane Austen film for people who don’t like Jane Austen? Well, that’s probably pushing it. But Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Austen’s unpublished early epistolary novella does bring to the screen her most atypical, scheming, amoral and self-centred heroine and comes across rather like a U-rated hybrid of BBC landfill bonnet drama and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with additional bons mots by Oscar Wilde. It all proves great frothy fun, with Kate Beckinsale clearly enjoying herself enormously with some expertly honed dialogue after all those dreadful Underworld movies. And at a briskly paced 93 minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Blessed with neither a husband nor a fortune, flirtatious, recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon (Beckinsale) is such an accomplished seductress that even her own sister-in-law, Mrs Catherine Vernon (Greenwell), considers her to be “a serpent in Eden’s garden”. Unfortunately for Catherine, Lady Susan has decided to seek refuge at Churchill, the Vernon country pile, until society gossip about her latest scandalous dalliance has died down. Naturally, she also takes the opportunity to sink her hooks into Catherine’s handsome younger brother, Reginald De Courcy (Samuel). But her plans are in danger of being derailed when her meek daughter Frederica (Clark) pitches up, having run away from school, and immediately charms the Vernons. Susan’s solution is to pair off suitably aghast Frederica with the older, besotted Sir James Martin (Bennett) – think Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-But-Dim meets Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year. “A man so rich and foolish will not remain single for long,” she reasons.

Stillman’s earlier films, such as The Last Days of Disco and Damsels in Distress, were characterised by arch, wordy, over-scripted dialogue that bears only a passing resemblance to human conversation. In Austen’s Regency milieu, with its barbed insults wrapped in the verbal cotton wool of overly formal politeness, this approach actually serves him rather well. Indeed, he succeeds admirably in supercharging the Austin idiom with laugh-out-loud one-liners that never seem out of place or too self-mocking. “May his next gouty attack have a happy ending,” Lady Susan remarks of her American friend Alicia Johnson’s (Sevigny) disobliging husband (Fry). And there’s surely a sly echo of Ronald Reagan when she exclaims “Facts are horrid things!” on being found out.

Even his most forgiving acolytes would never accuse Stillman of being a great visual stylist, but all he has to do here is point his camera at the costumes and stately homes (all in Ireland, fact fans) and let his cast do their stuff.  Austenites seeking emotional depth should probably look elsewhere, and Sevigny and Fry in particular are given disappointingly little to do. Beckinsale, however, provides ample compensation as the duplicitous, fabulously irredeemable Lady Susan. It’s hard not to join in when she beams with pleasure: “My daughter has shown herself to be cunning and manipulative. I couldn’t be more pleased.”