Jane austen ruined my life

[Chris Knipp]

PABLO PAULY AND CAMILLE RUTHERFORD IN JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE

LAURA PIANI: JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE (2024)

Imposter syndrome, bilingualism, and relliving Jane Austen

TRAILER

"The idea that Jane Austen 'ruined your life' is a common, humorous expression, particularly among those who feel their romantic expectations, or even their career, have been negatively impacted by the author's portrayal of love and marriage. This sentiment is often expressed by characters in fiction, who feel their real-life experiences don't match the idealized love and marriage depicted in Austen's novels. The phrase is a playful way of acknowledging that Austen's stories can create certain expectations that may not always be fulfilled in the real world."-- AI overview sorting out the theme, "How Jane Austen ruined my life."

Some would think Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is a Woody Allen surrogate. She is inttelligent, literary, and miserable, hasn't made love for two years. She is a spinster dreaming of love and of being a writer. She works at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, that famous bookstore catering to English language readers, and she knows her Jane Austen. So does the filmmaker: this film cleverly talks about being literary and trying to be a writer while mimicing a Jane Austen novel. Agathe is at the center, both the would-be writer and the central character.

Her colleague at Shakespeare & Company, Félix (Pablo Pauly), loves her but he is too familiar. They have even lived together with someone else for years, following the death of a parent in a car accident. One day while wielding chopsticks and sipping sake in a Japanese restaurant, Agathe looks into the reflection in the cup and has a fantasy-vision of a seductive, poetic young man. Long-haired, naked, he takes her and swirls her in a dance. It's the best-done sequence: perhaps the shoveling of food with the chopsticks is even sexier than the fantasy man.

This leads Agathe to create several chapters, which she writes in English, as is her wont. Félix secretly sends them to a writers residency in England and she gets accepted. She can't go, she won't, but her friends force her and at the last moment she relents: this also is well done. She is met by the tall, solemn Oliver (Charlie Anson), who picks her up at the statiion in his tiny, unreliable MG, which breaks down in a wood with no phone reception, or their phone batteries dead.

It's a chilly, memorable night. Implausibly, Oliver is a fifth great nephew of Jane Austen, who thinks the beloved author a bit overrated. The male elder of the house where they live is crazy and is seen wandering in the garden without his trousers in the mornings. His wife Beth (Liz Crowther) does all the work and keeps everything going, starting with a full English breakfast, which the French residents seem to have been pining for all their lives. All the residents are writers, who come in various colors, and the film gives us some quick sketches of their solemnity and self-importance, but lets them all turn nice and bond in the end.

Perhaps more importantly, there is a Jane Austen ball for which everyone dresses in glorious nineteenth-century clothes. Félix comes over for it, a surprise, and Agathe dances with both Félix and Oliver. She and Félix have an ease; but see how Oliver and Agathe lock into each others' eyes. Agathe heads off in the early morning, agast at the prospect of final "readings," when she hasn't written a word. But Beth is there, dilgent even in soothing egos, to reassure her.

And indeed Agathe has another beatiful manse, in France, that she has access too, where in solitude the words start flowing onto the page again. When she returns to the bookstore, the familiar associations make relations with Félix go flat again. He's not the one. But do we care? Unlike an Austen novel this film doesn't look into the pros and cons of the men vying for the heroine, though it could have done. This is one shortcoming. Another is the somewhat conventional and repetitive music. I at first found Camille Rutherford as Agathe somewhat plain and somewhat old for a Jane Austen heroine; they were very young. But look at the photo above and you'll see I was quite unfair, she is charning, and anyway she is not a Jane Austen heroine; she is a Jane Austen reader looking for love.

After all this is a French film and Aghathe is French. You can't really see an untried Austen heroine sipping sake in a Paris cafe. So it's okay. This is also, maybe most of all, interesting for its cross-fertilization of Anglo-French feellings and thoughts -- and words because nearly everybody even at the English residency speaks fluent French, just as the main French chracters speak English. They express nuances of feeling (whose subtleties however elude me) by when they switch from one language to the other. Which is the language of the heart? Who knows?

The template is familiar, but that allows for a film that's charming and light. It even has two llamas, who are very cute but spit in Agathe's eyes, which about sums things up.

Jane Austen Ruined My Life/Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, 98 mins.,debuted at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024, showing also at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Rencontres cinématographiques de Cannes, Marrakech, Santa Barbara, Miami, and some other festivals. It opened in Paris Jan. 22, 2025, welcome at that dry season - AlloCiné ratings: press 3.0 (60%) spectators 3.7 (74%). Metascore: 73%. US theatrical relase begins May 23, 2025. Showing already in San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere.