Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
Romance and literature collide in Laura Piani's entertaining romcom.
Camille Rutherford and Alan Fairbairn
Image courtesy of Icon Film Distribution.
Laura Piani's debut feature which she both wrote and directed is something of a surprise because it comes from Europe but belongs to a genre primarily associated with Hollywood and with Britain. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is an admirably cast and very assured rom.com. Our heroine is Agathe Robinson, a woman who is unmarried and in her thirties and works for Shakespeare & Co. the famous Paris bookshop. That’s apt because she herself is devoted to literature, venerates the novels of Jane Austen and is trying to write a novel. But, having not yet got beyond the first chapter, Agathe is uncertain about her talent and vulnerable too over the fact that she has not so far found the right man. That particular situation may also apply to her sister, Mona (Alice Butaud), with whom she lives but Mona already has a young son (Roman Angel) and readily finds men who respond to her advances. At least Agathe has a best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly) and, even if she is aware of him being something of a womaniser, she has feelings for him which might turn their bond into a sexual one.
But it is as a friend that Félix secretly posts off the opening section of her novel and a response comes back that it is considered good enough for Agathe to be invited for a stay of two weeks in England at the Jane Austen Residency. When she goes, she will meet there other writers who find that the rural atmosphere encourages their writing. However, she will also encounter a visitor of another kind. He is Oliver (Charlie Anson) the son of the elderly couple who are running the residency and himself a descendant of Jane Austen. Her first reaction to him is that he is snobbish and in any case she is ready to take against him as soon as he states outright that despite his heritage he is less than ardent about Jane Austen’s novels.
Lovers of romcoms will be well aware that when a heroine takes against a man at first sight it is no guarantee that she will not end up in his arms – often indeed it is quite the reverse. But with Piani’s film being French one is not quite sure to what extent it might play with the established formula. Its literary references are certainly not par for the course and are quite extensive. Naturally enough Austen's name comes up regularly but in passing Woolf, Dickens, Wordsworth and Duras also get a mention. It should be noted too that, while Camille Rutherford in the key role of Agathe rightly gets top billing, it is Pauly's name that follows her on the poster rather than that of Anson.
It is part of the pleasure of this film that it is so well cast. Although the film’s plot is one that is centred more on England than on Paris the greater part of the dialogue is in French accompanied by subtitles (in fact it’s also the case that all of the film was actually shot in France). The fact that Rutherford had a French mother and a British father and is accordingly bilingual makes her casting here particularly appropriate, but her talent too is an ideal fit for the part: she is attractive without being a conventional beauty, fully able to make the viewer concerned for Agathe and adroit when it comes to playing those touches of more obvious comedy which occur occasionally but are not overdone.
As the writer here, Piani seeks to balance contemporary expectations for this kind of work with a strong sense of the tradition that lies behind it. The former element includes incorporating more dramatic elements (Agathe has suffered a traumatic experience in the past), the inclusion of some strong language (the film has a ‘15’ certificate) and one effective comic scene that plays on nudity (oddly enough there is also one imagined episode early on which contains very discreet nudity but which doesn't quite fit the style of the film). As for Piani’s sense of the traditional, she knows what to echo in more ways than one. For younger viewers especially, the situation of the rom.com heroine with two potential lovers in her life will remind them of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) which worked so well that it led to the same card being played in the latest of the series, Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy (2025). But, of course, this device goes way back and one thinks too of the actor Ralph Bellamy who would inevitably lose out to his rival Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940) as he had already done in The Awful Truth (1937). There was a better balance in The Philadelphia Story (also 1940) when the rivals for Katharine Hepburn were Grant and James Stewart. Piani may have learnt from that since we have in Pauly an actor who can bring out Félix's charm and in Anson somebody reminiscent of Hugh Grant but who is not overshadowed by him. A traditional element from an earlier era is also present when the residency culminates in an annual ball. As the title of the film indicates, the film can be jokey about Jane Austen but it also respects her. Piani’s treatment of the ball sequence features on the soundtrack the Johann Strauss waltz ‘Roses from the South’ and in echoing scenes seen in screen versions of Austen's novels its tone is never parodic but instead an apt and affectionate pastiche.
When Jane Austen Wrecked My Life comes to a close we are back in Paris and, if Peter Von Poehl's music score with its delicate use of the piano seems very much part of what makes this rom.com properly French, so too the climactic scene however conventional in essence has the added touch of involving a poet reading a poem suited to the occasion. Unexpectedly and rather delightfully, the cameo role of the poet is taken by the American film director Frederick Wiseman. The credit for him brings back a phrase rarely seen today when his presence in the cast is described as being with his “amiable participation". Such touches add to the appeal of a film that seeks to be good entertainment of its kind and does so most successfully.
Original title: Jane Austen a gâché ma vie.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, Liz Crowther, Alan Fairbairn, Annabelle Lengronne, Alice Butaud, Lola Peploe, Roman Angel, Laurence Pierre, Rodrigue Pouvin, Pierre-François Garel, and Frederick Wiseman.
Dir Laura Piani, Pro Gabrielle Dumon, Screenplay Laura Piani, Ph Pierre Mazoyer, Pro Des Agnès Sery, Ed Floriane Allier, Music Peter Von Poehl, Costumes Flore Vauville.
Les Films du Veyrier/Sciapode/Canal+/Ciné+OCS/Pictanovo/Indéfilms 12-Icon Film Distribution.
98 mins. France. 2024. US Rel: 23 May 2025. UK Rel: 13 June 2025. Cert. 15.
