On the stock exchange of literary acclaim, reputations rise, fall, go bust and sometimes rise again. These days, few writers have a higher valuation than Jane Austen, who's gone from being merely a great novelist to becoming a marketable brand.
Beyond the scads of adaptations, we've had movies titled Austenland and The Jane Austen Book Club, Anne Hathaway playing the young Jane, and Mr. Darcys popping up everywhere from Bridget Jones' Diary to the Hallmark Channel's Mr. Darcy Trilogy. As I speak, the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice is enjoying a 20th anniversary re-release, while over on Masterpiece, that queen of British television, Keeley Hawes, stars as Jane's sister, Cassandra, in the series Miss Austen.
Even France is getting into the act with the release of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, an amiable new romance written and directed by Laura Piani. Steeped in the filmmaker's love of the writer, the movie — whose title is just a tease — embodies the pleasures and limitations of the Austen Boom.
The appealing Camille Rutherford stars as the 30-something Agathe, a would-be romance writer who works at the renowned Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Profoundly blocked in her writing, emotions, and romantic life, Agathe spends her time hanging out with her co-worker Félix — played by the amusing Pablo Pauly — a likable womanizer who's her best friend.
Agathe is headed nowhere until she gets invited to a writer's retreat at the Jane Austen Residency in England. There, she meets — you guessed it — a grumpy attractive man with whom she doesn't get along. His name is Oliver and he's played by Charlie Anson, an actor who's like the house-brand version of Hugh Grant. We sense that they're destined for each other, even as we wonder whether she's better suited to Félix, with whom she shared an unexpectedly passionate kiss as she left for England.
Austen is rightly admired and beloved for creating enduringly memorable heroines who are strong, smart, principled, often witty and willful. They have character. Even when they're wrongheaded, they're never trivial, especially about romance. You see, in Austen's world a woman's freedom to act was profoundly constrained. The choice of a man was a decision not just about chemistry but financial security and social status. Indeed, Austen portrays the society that limits her heroines with X-ray eyes, showing us the greed, vanity and class snobbery of a rigid social order where only a few live in comfort.
And, Austen's consciousness is a thrillingly powerful presence. She writes like the most dazzling of her own creations — with immaculately wrought sentences, a stinging satirical eye and a sense of judgment that can be positively ruthless. There's nothing vague or wishy-washy about her.
The risk in explicitly evoking Austen is that it instantly raises our standards. And sadly, Piani — like nearly all of today's Austenites — can't match her model's clarity or élan. Her movie is tamer and more sentimental, and utterly unconcerned with society.
In Agathe, Piani replaces the brilliance and verve of Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse with low-key neurosis, as if fearing we wouldn't like a modern woman who's sharp or sometimes unlikable. You keep waiting for Agathe to act boldly or at least say something genuinely witty.
The movie is weighed down by all its allusions and borrowings, which become a substitute for creating something new. Doing this is hardly impossible. Hollywood worked Austen territory marvelously during the '30s and '40s — check out The Shop Around the Corner or The Philadelphia Story — while over in post-war France, Eric Rohmer made a score of sharp movies about romantic desire and illusion without ever needing to resurrect Mr. Darcy for one last bout of pride and prejudice.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Austen that "of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness." One measure of her greatness is that, two centuries on, filmmakers like Piani are still so inspired by her work that they want to make their own versions. As an Austen lover myself, I understand the temptation. And anyway, better that than constantly remaking Batman.
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