Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie), Laura Piani’s first feature, is a French cinematic contribution to the celebratory chorus attending the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. It tells the story of Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), a thirtysomething Parisian and aspiring writer who works at the English- language bookshop Shakespeare & Company, in the Latin Quarter. Agathe is single and lives with her sister and her young nephew. Feeling out of kilter with her century, she takes refuge in the literature of the past and sees real life through the lens of Austen’s books. Agathe identifies with Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, who she thinks has lost her bloom and allowed life to pass her by; her colleague and best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly), is, according to her, an avatar of Mansfield Park’s serial seducer Henry Crawford.
When Agathe travels from France to Britain to work on her novel in a manor house that is home to the Jane Austen Residency, she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), a British relative of Austen’s whom Agathe initially dismisses as haughty, unpleasant and as having “un méga balai dans le cul” (“a big broom stuck up his arse”). Allowing for the fun dissonance of contemporary French slang, such first impressions ring a familiar Austenian bell. They have also been set up in an earlier scene in which Félix asked Agathe, the reluctant singleton, what she was waiting for: “Is it Mark Darcy?” (Helen Fielding’s update of Austen’s original). This question defines the focus of the film. What interests Piani isn’t so much Austen’s books as the English-language romantic comedies that have taken inspiration from them.
The history of cinema is a series of creative dialogues, love affairs and sometimes fallings-out between film-makers and those who have influenced their work. Sometimes, however, the result of such influence falls short. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life unfolds in the shadow of Richard Curtis’s cinematic universe and, when casting the part of Oliver, Piani was delighted to find an actor who reminded her of Hugh Grant. As a genre, romantic comedy is often underrated and dismissed as facile; Piani disagrees, and that is to her credit. But unfortunately, one of the achievements of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is to demonstrate that it isn’t easy to make something as entertaining as Four Weddings and a Funeral or Notting Hill, which, for all their calculated transatlantic appeal and jaunty portrayals of an idealized tranche of British life, achieve a far more substantial sense of plot, characterization and human experience than Piani’s film.
The casting and performances are good – Beth and Todd, the custodians of the residency and Oliver’s parents, are played convincingly by Alan Fairbairn (in a moving turn as a dementia sufferer) and Liz Crowther (who, pleasingly, played Julia Bertram in a BBC production of Mansfield Park made in 1983). Rutherford, with an austere beauty that comes alive in candlelight, makes a sympathetic modern incarnation of a contrarian Austen heroine, but neither her character nor any others are given much scope, depth or development. The men are particularly one-dimensional. The Austenian/Curtisian love triangle formed by Agathe, the ebullient Félix and the initially repulsive love object, Oliver, remains a slight, thinned-down version of the source material.
In one scene, Agathe interrogates the I Ching (the Chinese divination text) about her love life and receives the discouraging response that there is “a blockage between yin and yang”. This pronouncement reverberates throughout the film. Not only do literature and cinema fail to engage meaningfully with each other in the story, in spite of lingering shots of bookshelves and glancing allusions to Vladimir Nabokov or J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. Piani also struggles to deliver a successful romantic comedy on her own terms. Rutherford is made to do slapstick, but she is not a natural comedian. Is that the point? It’s difficult to know for sure. Many of the film’s jokes fall flat.
Making a bilingual film about how difficult it is to communicate is an interesting choice, but in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, much has become lost in translation. Piani has neither embraced the French tradition of romantic comedy – often highly literate, occasionally experimental, and ranging from Michel Deville, Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut to Jean Eustache and Jacques Demy – nor successfully appropriated a different set of tropes belonging to American and British cinema, inflected by limber screwball comedy with witty, quickfire dialogue. As for the film’s flirtation with Austen’s world, it remains frustratingly half-hearted. For example, in a ballroom scene in Georgian costume that is a direct reference to similar scenes in Austen film adaptations, there is only a brief glimpse of the old English dances that are so effective at having the protagonists circle each other and come face to face. Similarly, Piani’s film features two maisons de famille, but remains on the surface of their history and significance, gliding over the textures of wallpaper, hessian and lace.
Yet there is promise in the film, in those scenes where, to quote the advice Agathe receives from her creative writing teacher (“Lâche-toi!”), the director lets herself go. These are moments of dreamlike slippage. The past bleeds into contemporary reality when Félix climbs into a black cab in his Georgian costume or when Agathe opens her letter from the Residency, which is sealed with red wax. Eating alone in a Chinese restaurant, Agathe requests impulsively “the ladies’ version” of a sake cup (which, once the drink is drained, reveals a graphic photograph of a naked man) and this ushers in a reverie in which the man in the cup appears before her like a genie released from the lamp. Most suggestive of all is a mysterious shot, the more powerful for being understated, showing Agathe, who has returned to her family’s country home, feeling her dead father’s hand on her shoulder, triggering her to write. The film would have benefited from embracing more fully this enigmatic interplay between the character’s interior life and the images we see, between creativity and the erotic, and between Agathe’s complaint – writer’s block – and what releases her from it, which is in part her decision to start writing in English, her father’s language. Something of a missed opportunity, then, where the crux of a good story is obscured by uncertain pastiche.
Muriel Zagha is a freelance writer and broadcaster on the visual arts, and the co-host of the podcast Garlic & Pearls
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