There’s a sense and sensibility to Laura Piani’s debut feature, JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE.
Camille Rutherford plays Agathe, an aspiring author working in the famous Parisian bookshop “Shakespeare & Co”. She shares an undeniable chemistry with her best friend/co-worker Félix, portrayed with playful pep by Pablo Pauly, but they have never consummated this attraction.
Perpetually surrounded by stories of others’ desires and adventures, she longs for a romance like the ones in her favourite novels. Out of the blue, Agathe is unexpectedly invited to a prestigious Jane Austen residency in England.
Spending two weeks in a manor ripped directly from the pages of one of Austen’s stories, Agathe becomes acquainted with the handsome yet headstrong Oliver, the quintessential stiff upper lipped Englishman who just happens to be Jane Austen’s great-great-great-great nephew.
JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE may appeal to Janeites or Austenites or whatever title fans may pride or prejudice themselves in, but it remains a trifle of tropes which resist temptation to whoop thing too boisterously up.
Indeed, Agathe does the deed with Felix much to the disappointment and disdain of Oliver, but if he has an axe to grind it creates scant sparks.
Overall, JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE fails to measure up to the perfection of Miss Austen’s architectural prose and plotting.
Nevertheless, Camille Rutherford does impart the sheer combative intelligence engendered in Austen’s leading ladies, certainly a much more interesting character than Oliver, played here as a sardonic, defeated man, imperious and sulky.
JANE AUSTEN WRECK MY LIFE is a pretty shell picked up on the shoreline of Austenland, but nothing startling, nothing to haunt the memory.
Agathe quite rightly picks Sense and Sensibility as her favourite Jane Austen novel, but the film lacks that story’s satirical intent leaving us with a so so rom com, easily digestible. Not quite an Austen healing.
