Love & Friendship | Little White Lies

Love & Friendship

26 May 2016 / Released: 27 May 2016

Four women in ornate period costumes - gold, blue, and purple - standing in an elegant, historical interior setting.
Four women in ornate period costumes - gold, blue, and purple - standing in an elegant, historical interior setting.
4

Anticipation.

Whit Stillman can do no wrong.

4

Enjoyment.

So, so good. Shows that literary adaptations can make good movies.

4

In Retrospect.

Like all of Stillman’s films, there’s major re-watch factor.

The peer­less Whit Still­man returns with an ensem­ble Jane Austen adap­ta­tion like no other.

Whit Still­man is a direc­tor fas­ci­nat­ed by the idea of peo­ple glad­ly dis­placed from their own time: fop­pish debu­tantes abide by roman­tic era court­ing rit­u­als in 90s Man­hat­tan in Met­ro­pol­i­tan; a good old lim­bo con­test trumps mod­ern jazz in Barcelona; and lovers of dis­co music band togeth­er while box­es of wax plat­ters are torched at base­ball games in The Last Days of Disco.

With his ebul­lient and scald­ing­ly droll lat­est – a superla­tive screw­ball adap­ta­tion of Jane Austen’s novel­la Lady Susan’ – Still­man may have final­ly found an ensem­ble of char­ac­ters who exist in their own time. The prob­lem, though, is that quite a few of them want out, des­per­ate to embrace what­ev­er pro­gres­sive notions the future holds. In fact, while his past work has often cel­e­brat­ed nos­tal­gia and even kitsch, this new film is his first to reject such frip­peries in favour of hard, unsen­ti­men­tal rea­son. And it’s all the more hilar­i­ous for it.

Love & Friend­ship sees puffed-up gen­try adorned in lace-trimmed gar­ments (colour-cod­ed as to the capac­i­ty of their imag­i­na­tion) try­ing to get their pris­sy minds around the con­cept of mod­ern romance. Or in some cas­es, doing their best to keep anti­quat­ed tra­di­tions of courtship burn­ing bright. Kate Beck­in­sale aston­ish­es as a maven of social manip­u­la­tion named Lady Susan Ver­non, intro­duced in a top-to-toe black com­bo replete with osten­ta­tious feath­ered plumes.

To call her a chis­eller would be over-stat­ing it; she’s just ruth­less­ly inde­pen­dent and out to pre­serve her own tiny island of high-mind­ed grat­i­fi­ca­tion. The only oth­er soul allowed to vis­it is Chloë Sevigny’s dis­placed Amer­i­can soci­ety dame Ali­cia John­son. Horse-drawn car­riages and dis­creet, cov­ered byways are the venues of their plot­ting, as Mr John­son (Stephen Fry) has pro­hib­it­ed his spouse from frater­nising with Lady Susan due to her unsavoury reputation.

Recent­ly wid­owed, Susan takes on the task of cou­pling up her bash­ful daugh­ter Fred­er­i­ca (Morfy­dd Clark) with any wealthy loon who’s hap­py to take the bait. Opt­ing to use the grand coun­try stack of Churchill as her fig­u­ra­tive chess board serves to com­pli­cate mat­ters, as all of her schem­ing is being wit­nessed and inter­pret­ed (some­times cor­rect­ly, often not) by cold­ly sym­pa­thet­ic sis­ter-in-law Cather­ine Ver­non (Emma Green­well) and her lantern-jawed, non-oafish broth­er, Regi­nald DeCour­cy (Xavier Samuel), him­self pos­si­bly har­bour­ing designs on the sphinx-like Susan.

While it all remains exor­bi­tant­ly enjoy­able on a super­fi­cial lev­el (just hear­ing these actors twist their tongues around the dia­logue is a delight in itself), there’s more to the film than even those with their spy­glass pressed to the screen might see. While its roots are sunk deeply in the tra­di­tions of dress-up cham­ber com­e­dy, the film also depicts pol­i­tics and busi­ness as games of ver­bal dou­ble-deal­ing which require the play­er to expunge all traces of phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al weakness.

Stillman’s work has often favoured build­ing up char­ac­ters and wrap­ping a loose-weave nar­ra­tive around their eccen­tric tra­vails, though Love & Friend­ship is plot­ted to intri­cate per­fec­tion, with stag­ing, chore­og­ra­phy, tim­ing and geog­ra­phy all para­mount to the sub­tle mechan­ics of the com­e­dy. The illu­sion of friv­o­li­ty, where lev­i­ty and absent-mind­ed­ness help to flesh out del­i­cate philo­soph­i­cal sub­text, makes this a grand cru comedy.

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