Sir James is pomp-and-gloriously played by Tom Bennett, who reminded me of Peter Cook as one of his impervious-to-reality titled Englishmen. The catalyst is Lady Susan's teenage daughter, Frederica, who has run away from her expensive boarding school - and who's trailed to the Vernon estate by a boobish suitor named Sir James Martin. It's still hard to keep the relationships straight, but the device bespeaks an affection for the milieu that makes you want to use words like "bespeaks." Love & Friendship has both formal elegance and theatrical glee, so what might have seemed stuffy and posed now sings with undercurrents. Stillman helps by presenting the characters one or two at a time, with accompanying title cards and descriptions. You might be thinking, "That's a lot of names to keep track of" - and I've cited only a few. Reginald claims to want to study Lady Susan's wiles from an anthropological perspective, but he seems more and more seduced by them.
Just as alarming to Lady Catherine is the behavior of her younger brother, Reginald DeCourcy, played by Xavier Samuel with a bit of Hugh Grant's adorable lockjaw. She charms him, but unnerves his wife, Lady Catherine DeCourcy Vernon, an unusually empathetic woman played by the delightful Emma Greenwell. The next place she decides to stay - that's how she lives, you see, off wealthy friends and relations - is the mansion of her late husband's brother. We meet her after she has left the estate of one Lord Manwaring after enchanting the host and driving the hostess, Lady Manwaring, to despair.
She's attractive, she's indefatigable, and she's poetically eloquent in justifying her immorality. But as played by Kate Beckinsale, she cuts an impressive figure. The woman's will must be thwarted, of course, for the sake of her spirited daughter. She seems a pale copy of the villainess of another epistolary novel that was widely-read at the time, Les Liaisons Dangereuse.Įarly in Love & Friendship you realize that Stillman doesn't hate Lady Susan nearly as much as Austen seems to. Her protagonist, Lady Susan Vernon, is an impoverished widow with designs on a married lord and a malign indifference to her own teenage daughter. It's an epistolary work, told via letters, and, as such, missing Austen's all-important voice as narrator. The title isn't even hers - it didn't have one. Austen wrote the book early in her career, before Pride and Prejudice. That's not quite as heretical as it sounds. The writer-director Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is an improvement on its source, Jane Austen's novella Lady Susan.
Ross McDonnell/Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions Lady Susan (right, played by Kate Beckinsale) consults with her American friend (Chloë Sevigny) in Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.
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