How well do Jane Austen and Whit Stillman get along? That’s the decisive question in Love & Friendship, the American director’s adaptation of an early Austen curio, her long-unpublished epistolary novella Lady Susan. It certainly sounds like a dream fit, since caustic comedies of high-society manners are exactly what Stillman does and always has – there’s even a barbed throwaway exchange about Austen in his debut film, Metropolitan.
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It’s with ticklish glee, then, that you watch Love & Friendship live up to every possible expectation you could set for it, opening out the adulterous games of Austen’s surprisingly risqué text and elaborating on them with impish, often breathlessly funny verve. It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.
Not the least of his film’s coups is handing Kate Beckinsale her best role in, ooh, 20 years, since she played Emma Woodhouse in Andrew Davies’s 1996 Emma on ITV. Let’s face it, Beckinsale’s action-figurine roles in Hollywood have mostly tended to cramp her style. Here she springs back with a deliciously controlled and self-aware performance, playing the Austen title character as a born manipulator so devious she can spin the rest of the ensemble around her little finger.
The story begins with Lady Susan Vernon newly widowed and trying her luck with the inconveniently married Lord Manwaring – the first character to be introduced by caption, as “a divinely attractive man”, but given a walk-on part and, in a typically dry Stillman touch, no lines whatsoever. To grease the wheels of this dangerous liaison, Susan has packed her poor daughter (perfect, sensitive Morfydd Clark) off to a grim-sounding boarding school, but also aims to ingratiate herself with her late husband’s family, catching the eye of a fetching and gullible young in-law called Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel).
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