Love & Friendship (2016)
Directed by Whit Stillman
From Jane Austen’s novella, the beautiful and cunning Lady Susan Vernon visits the estate of her in-laws to wait out colorful rumors of her dalliances and to find husbands for herself and her daughter. Two young men, handsome Reginald DeCourcy and wealthy Sir James Martin, severely complicate her plans.
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What critics compared Love & Friendship to
Writer/director Stillman has made films before about insular societies — the social sphere of the debutantes in Metropolitan, the glittery nights of the club-going book editors in The Last Days of Disco, the busy intricacies of the small college in Damsels in Distress — and he excels at honing in on the complex rules required to navigate them.
“Love & Friendship” reunites Beckinsale with her co-star from Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), Chloë Sevigny, who plays Anna’s American confidante, Mrs. Johnson.
The indie auteur’s 1998 comic gem The Last Days of Disco may as well be Austen fan fiction; set in the early 1980s, it examines the “ferocious pairing off” among a group of young people who frequent New York discotheques during the music scene’s decline.
Those apt descriptions by critics and bloggers of preppy director Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners such as Metropolitan, Barcelonaand The Last Days of Disco, might just as well apply to his passion for Jane Austen.
“Love & Friendship” is based on an early, lesser-known novella by the maid of Hampshire, but it has the wise, worldly wit of Stillman’s “Metropolitan” (1990), “Barcelona” (1994), and “The Last Days of Disco” (1998) — movies in which streams of glittering chatter course over riverbeds of joy and pain.
(“ Before Rome, before Babylon, before the pyramids … ”) Though totally different in tenor and style, it actually reminded me of the opening moments of Whit Stillman’s 2016 period comedy Love & Friendship , which delivered such a rapid-fire stream of character information that it liberated the viewer from feeling like they needed to pay attention to any of it; they could just sit back and enjoy the ride.
In many adaptations, lack of fidelity is a benefit; take the contemporary sensibilities Whit Stillman and Greta Gerwig brought to their Love & Friendship and Little Women , respectively.
This is perhaps the most playfully subversive costume drama since Whit Stillman’s similarly verbose Love & Friendship , though this is a considerably racier affair, laden as it is with eye-wateringly explicit exchanges.