“What, another movie based on a book of Jane Austen?” Desabafarão some the premiere news of “Love and Friendship” American Whit Stillman understandably aghast with the regular flow of versions for film and television works of the English writer who has come to the point of including parodies woozy as “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” or “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” that were books before moving to the screen, the second of which coyly entitled in Portugal, in his film incarnation, “Pride and Prejudice and War.” But anyway, I attention to “Love and Friendship”, because although adapt a work of youth and least known of the author, “Lady Susan” (she would have 19 or 20 years old when he wrote it) and only published posthumously, this may well be the best film made so far on a book by Jane Austen. And in this case, an atypical book, bold and maliciously “subversive.”
[See the "trailer" to "Love and Friendship"]
Written in epistolary form as a first version of “Sense and Sensibility,” “Lady Susan”, a short novel, it is different from other works of Austen and contrary to the literary conventions of the time, because its heroine, Lady Susan Vernon, an aristocrat, recent widow with no nest egg, is manipulative, scheming and hustler, and proud, beautiful, intelligent, witty, frowned upon by women and admired by men. Lady Susan’s trying to marry rich, while engaging with the husband of one of her friends, who welcomed her in her own home. In passing, still looking for a good husband for Frederica daughter, a roll without salt, with which embirra solemnly. Not content with this, even mockery of moral codes, composure and social behavior of his time, and is actively cat-shoe them. A “scandalous” woman, as it was called then, in the late eighteenth century, beginning of the nineteenth century. But, like the women of their condition and the social ecosystem of the time, and austenianas heroines in general is doing to have a comfortable, solvent and secure life, lack of also find domestic happiness.
[See interview with director Whit Stillman]
Perhaps to underscore the irony of the story there is little of both, Whit Stillman decided to call the film “Love and Friendship”, the title of another work juvenile Jane Austen. And he had the bright idea to personify Lady Susan, call Kate Beckinsale, who has spent 40 and 20 years entered a television adaptation of another book of Austen’s “Emma” in the lead role. Lady Susan Vernon is a character or serves Kate Beckinsale as a face in the glove hand of an elegant woman. Making the best use of its beauty aristocratic and its wide dramatic experience, Beckinsale plays Lady Susan (who always wears mourning) as such a distinguished and resolute social and emotional predator, which is superior know not only the majority of women surrounding it (almost all resigned, submissive or stupid), but also to men (go almost all between being dizzy or bores), and despises them. But that can not fail to have our admiration by his grace , haughtiness (the scene where escorraça an acquaintance who had a lack of to challenge education aloud in the street is priceless), shrewdness, impudence and sense of humor, by challenging embarrassment, humiliation and social hypocrisies at a time when women did not, and was determined to take charge of their destiny without bending to anyone.
[See the interview with Kate Beckinsale]
Whit Stillman refers to epistolary nature of “Lady Susan “shooting several sequences where there are letters written, sealed, sent, received and read, and even plays bits of text from some on the screen as subtitles and intertitles. And despite the plot almost never walk by open spaces, confined as it is the interiors of mansions and houses, gardens corners and carriages, “Love and Friendship” is never a claustrophobic or cramped movie. We are always entertained the drives and the Lady Susan schemes, while she and her daughter go from house to house ( “We do not live nowhere we visited,” says one, imperial) by the radiance of the dialogue and the spirit fencing, the constant comic outputs the characters, and the varied characterization of, interpreted by a very competent bouquet of actors and actresses, family as Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave or Chloë Sevigny in (only) American friend and confidant of Lady Susan, or less known but unpayable as Tom Bennett, who almost steals the movie in the role of unfathomably stupid, stupid and inconvenient, but very rich, Sir James Martin, who has a queer scene laughing involving peas in a formal dinner.
[behind the scenes filming and listen to the director and the cast]
in addition to orchestrating flawless all movements and interactions of this little world as Lady Susan orchestra your Stillman can still, in “Love and Friendship” refresh the conventions of the “period film”, preventing the tape not only collapse under the weight of opulent scenarios (the shooting was in Ireland), the wardrobe, the “décors” and its minutiae, the recreation behavior, and uses and social customs as well as the onlooker’s attention is not diverted from history for them . Everything here, the more anachronistic prop the richest mansion or the fact more thoroughly recreated, is secondary and is servant of the plot and the characters. I will not be far from the truth if you write “Love and Friendship” will become the film by which it will measure all future adaptations to film Jane Austen books. And it will be very difficult to take it that status, there it goes.
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