This year’s French film festival delivers a movie bringing a Gallic sensibility to that most English of novelists, Jane Austen.
Aptly, the film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life – or as it was originally titled, Jane Austen a gâché ma vie – starts in a bookshop. It also ends in a bookshop – so it’s bookshop-bookended.
And it’s not just another librairie. It’s Shakespeare and Company, the actual Anglophone institution in Paris that’s one of the world’s most famous bookshops. It has a, yes, storied history; the shop’s two incarnations both served as gathering places for notable literary expats in the city throughout much of the 20th century.
The current Shakespeare and Company opened in 1951, in a former monastery a few minutes’ procession from Notre-Dame.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is not the shop’s first movie. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset started there, while the shop was also a location in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
But it’s the first film about someone who works there, directed by someone who once worked there, and by someone who partly wrote it there – in guest writers’ apartments above, and the adjoining café – and then filmed there.
The wrecked life of the title belongs to S&C bookseller Agathe Robinson, played with ungainly charm by Anglo-French actress Camille Rutherford. Robinson is single, antisocial, quirky, clumsy. She lives with her outgoing sister and nephew and is happiest with her head in a book by a certain Regency author. She would like to become a writer and experience love like the ones in her favourite Austen novels. She’s in a should-they-shouldn’t-they friendship with shop colleague Félix (Pablo Pauly), who encourages her literary dream.
When he sends Agathe’s latest story to a Jane Austen writing residency in the UK, she’s invited there to join a group who take Austen very seriously indeed. Also at the country house retreat is Oliver, a handsome but aloof English lecturer, who’s a bit of an Austen snob, despite being a descendant of the novelist.
The film’s director and writer, Laura Piani, worked at S&C for seven years or so from 2007, when she was a student and young scriptwriter, and is still good friends with the owners.
“It was a whole life experience for me,” she says via Zoom from Paris. “It gave me a safe space where I could actually pay my rent. So, I never had to take any project that I didn’t want to write. That was a huge luxury for a young writer.
“At that time, the bookshop was open until 11 o’clock in the evening. So we had a strange crowd, from the tourists who were there during the day to sometimes homeless people, lonely people who were just seeing the lights on. So it was a very interesting crowd to watch. The people that were working with me inspired the film, because they were all aspiring writers, actors, or musicians.”
Yes, she says, there is a sizable Jane Austen section at S&C doing a good turnover. It seems, unlike the women in the novels, the retailers do not fear they will be left on the shelf.
Piani thinks her film reflects not just her own deep Austen appreciation, including the many screen adaptations, but her love of Richard Curtis-penned British romcoms of the 1990s and early 2000s.
“I did this film because I was missing as a viewer a film like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Notting Hill, all these incredible films. I couldn’t see anything that was giving me the same feeling as a viewer, which was, it’s funny, it’s entertaining, but it’s also saying something about the time we are living in.”
She also wrote some of the screenplay while staying at Chawton House – the manor house owned by Austen’s brother Edward, in the Hampshire village where the novelist Austen spent her final years living with her sister in a cottage not far away.
There have been shows and films built on Austen appreciation before, like Austenland and Lost in Austen. But Wrecked My Life is probably the first French one. While American Austenophilia has been a thing for quite a while, a French take on it just seems a little, well, odd.
“I know what you mean by odd, because it’s a monument in England and it’s always weird when someone from another country is trying to do something with a monument, right?
“In France, we don’t study Jane Austen at school. So, people here feel like they know her by watching the films, but they don’t know how she writes. They don’t know the humour, they don’t know the political questions, they don’t know her whole story. So that’s why I wanted to do it for the French audience.”
Rutherford, who joins the Zoom call from Antwerp, agrees. “In France, we talk more about Balzac, Proust and Marguerite Duras. Maybe I’m saying something really stupid, but maybe French people have more of a snobbish point of view on Jane Austen. That her novels were cheesy and girly-girly.”
Paris-born and raised Rutherford, who has an English father, remembers watching Ang Lee’s classic Sense and Sensibility and the BBC Pride and Prejudice on DVD on repeat while on summer holidays with her sister at their grandparents’ house in the north of England.
Looking for a bilingual actress for the Agathe role, Piani spotted Rutherford in a 2020 French movie Felicità. She’s since appeared in Michel Gondry’s The Book of Solutions and the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall.
“I was looking for the opposite of the glossy actress that you see in so many romcoms. I was looking for someone who was carrying many things – melancholy, humour, that she’s beautiful but she doesn’t play with it. It’s not what is interesting about her.
“When we first met, she arrived earlier and I saw her from far away in the cafe, and she ordered a beer and French fries. I have to tell you, in France, actresses, they don’t drink beer and they don’t eat French fries. It was already a miracle.”
I was looking for someone who was carrying many things – melancholy, humour, that she’s beautiful but she doesn’t play with it.
Another aspect of Rutherford’s life informed her Agathe character – her younger sister was a struggling writer whose first book was published two years ago. “My sister was always saying, ‘I’m not good enough. My novel is shit.’ And I was always trying to push her to finish, and always admiring her because it’s so hard to write.
“So, Agathe is maybe more like my sister than I am. But of course, she’s like me because it’s me playing her. So, there’s so much of me in her.”
While filming, among the challenges for director and leading lady alike was a ball scene complete with Regency-era choreography.
Rutherford: “I was really scared for that. I’m a very, very bad dancer.”
Piani: “Before we were shooting this ball, we realised that none of them knew how to dance. And I didn’t know how to teach them.”
A quick call was made to an elderly Paris dance teacher who had appeared in an earlier short by the director. With four hours of rehearsal, they pulled it off.
Piani: “It’s my favourite scene, which is a miracle. We had no money for the costumes, no money for the lighting, no nothing. And somehow, through the collective experience, it worked.”
The bilingual film has gone out in France and is about to hit the English-speaking world after being picked up by major US arthouse distributor Sony Pictures Classics.
We finish with a bookshop-bookend. Piani says the film has affected S&C in a different way to previous movies.
“I don’t know if I told you, Camille, but it moved me a lot. The owner told me that since the film came out in France, she’s received tons of letters from young women who want to work in the bookshop. Usually, the people who work there are English or American, sometimes Australian. But since the film came out in France, it’s young French women. Young French women who want to be you.”
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is part of the French Film Festival Aotearoa, taking place at more than 30 cinemas nationwide from May 28 to June 29.
