Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year – from gushing BBC documentaries to actually quite witty Hallmark cable movies – France offers up Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a cordial, low-energy rom com that sets out to Austenify the lovelorn of Paris.
In Laura Piani’s debut feature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works at the Shakespeare and Company English bookshop on the Left Bank and is a ultra-cautious single of a type who made sense in Austen’s day but probably over-populates the world of film in ours. Agathe identifies with the stoically thwarted heroine of Persuasion, Anne Elliot, and explains her own two years of celibacy thus: “I’m not into Uber sex. I don’t do digital.” Whatever this means (and the subtitles might have let us down a bit here), it reminds us how hard it is truly to mirror Austen’s world within our own.
The dire romantic dilemmas of Austen’s heroines – choosing between money and happiness, sex appeal and good character – lose their ironic force when sex comes cheap and partnering up is not a life sentence. And so it is here when Agathe has a choice, under no particular pressure, between a somewhat caddish type and a stiff-necked type at an Austen-themed writers’ retreat in the English countryside.
The first of these chaps is the droll Félix (Pablo Pauly), who works with Agathe in the Paris bookshop and hangs around her like a charm bracelet while gadding about with other gals. The second is the über-broody Oliver (Charlie Anson), a cold bathroom floor of English reserve who helps out at the writer’s retreat after his scholarly career has tanked. He’s a distant relative of Austen, no less, but thinks the Sage of Steventon’s works are “overrated” and “limited”.
Within seconds, Oliver is rubbing Agathe up the wrong way (that is, almost certainly the right way) and she’s instantly all a-blunder – throwing up on his shoes, slagging him off on the phone without realising he knows French, and accidentally walking into his room naked.
We’re carried through by the wonderfully supple performance of Camille RutherfordSo we’re quite soon close to broader Bridget Jones territory while the writer-director simultaneously tries to keep the mood in line with the ur-texts beloved by the heroine. As a blocked, wannabe author, Agathe settles into the boring British hideout (a mansion that looks suspiciously like a chateau in northern France), within a Home Counties where villages are said to be 20 miles apart, apple carts roam the lanes and piles of crumpets are served at breakfast.
Much of the dialogue is undoubtedly natty but the handful of other scribes at the retreat are under-developed, delivering AI-level views on books with lines like: “Your perception of literature is confoundedly naïve!” Even though Félix turns up again in the middle to muddle things with Oliver, the second act plotting is desultory with stakes and comic predicaments lower than in the worlds of either Richard Curtis or Jane Austen. Things come to a head at a costume ball, also an obligatory scene in the Hallmark homages.
We’re carried through by the wonderfully supple performance of Camille Rutherford as Agathe, her face a minuet of bemusement, prickliness and frustration – the whole panoply of miffed. Her features are a script unto itself, with a recurrent what-can-you-do look of someone who’s just let down a small puffin asking for fish.
She’s playing a thwarted writer who won’t quite commit creatively, and a bit too much of that applies to the film itself. Right at the end, an aged, Yoda-like figure gives a poetry reading back in the Paris bookshop. He’s played by the American documentary master (and occasional actor) Frederick Wiseman – a twinkling cameo that’s another performance delight.
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