Jun 12

Jun 12 FILM REVIEW: “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”, but it made my morning

We all fantasise about crossing paths with a stranger, and feeling a spark that sends us into an amorous tailspin. Dating apps are dry and exhausting, where is the romance in swiping through a stack of strangers who advertise themselves like a hitchhiking pig, holding a sign that reads ‘TO THE SLAUGHTER’? Such are the feelings of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’s heroine, Agathe (Camille Rutherford).

In the feature film debut from French writer/director Laura Piani, Agathe is an aspiring writer and Jane Austen fan who works at a Parisian bookstore, alongside her best friend, chronic philanderer Felix (Pablo Pauly). An old soul stuck in a two-year-long dry spell, Agathe renounces the idea of dating apps. ‘I’m not into Uber sex’, she tells Felix, who chastises her for not adjusting to the courting landscape of the modern world - ‘What are you waiting for, Mr Darcy?’.

Inspired after catching a glimpse of a naked man posing at the bottom of a sake cup, Agathe begins writing a romance novel. Impressed, Felix submits her unfinished work to the Jane Austen Residency, a writer’s retreat held at a mansion in England. Agathe reluctantly agrees to go, and Felix sends her off with an impulsive kiss. Upon her arrival in England, Agathe meets literature professor Oliver (Charlie Anson), the ‘great great great great’ nephew of Jane Austen, and the son of the elderly couple who run the residency. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when he reveals he finds Austen overrated, establishing himself as the Mr Darcy to her Elizabeth Bennett.

The enemies-to-lovers trope is charmingly executed, veering into grimace-inducing cliché only a handful of times, for instance, when a nude Agathe opens Oliver’s bedroom door mistaking it for a bathroom, and slips and falls during an impromptu dance in the woods. Anson and Rutherford have such strong chemistry as Oliver and Agathe, it doesn’t take much convincing to root for them. The arrival of Felix at the mansion nudges the dynamic into a deliciously awkward love triangle, where you can easily predict the direction of the plot, but it doesn’t matter, thanks to the solid, witty script and easy chemistry between the leads.

At the film screening, I sat surrounded by a crowd of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and the occasional stray husband. Cackles and shrieks of delight could be heard throughout the film, and I left the cinema smiling, eyes scanning the footpath for handsome strangers.