Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.
Subscribe to listen
Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Unpersuasive: Pablo Pauly and Camille Rutherford in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. Photo / Supplied
Unpersuasive: Pablo Pauly and Camille Rutherford in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. Photo / Supplied
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, directed by Laura Piani, is in cinemas now.
Anglo-French Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is an anxiety-ridden, romance-phobic singleton who manages the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare & Co. But like many lovers of literature, Agathe also has a novel in her. When her womanising best mateFelix (Pablo Pauly) secretly applies for Agathe to attend a Jane Austen writers’ residency in England, Agathe, a slave to her own imposter syndrome, attends with reluctance.
She soon meets her match in pompous Brit Oliver (Downton’s Charlie Anson, a poor man’s Hugh Grant), a descendant of the great author who thinks Austen’s work is overrated. Their immediate mutual snippiness predictably mirrors Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. Unfortunately, Oliver is so loathsome this film will have to work extra hard if both Agathe and the audience are to fall for him.
This is the feature debut of French writer-director Laura Piani, who hews her story boringly close to the predictability of the genre. Agathe is styled like a modern-day Amélie, but while actress Rutherford is all Parisian cheekbones and effortless style, the nonsense script tips poor Agathe into embarrassing, unfunny mishaps. Physical pratfalls abound, while the English writers-in-residence pontificate about the true purpose of literature. One unamusingly plotted faux pas invites the viewer to laugh at an old man suffering from dementia.
As a love triangle unfurls, there’s plenty of angst on screen but no real depth. Instead, the romantic leads are three self-confessed screw-ups who can’t get their acts together to figure out who is Agathe’s true love.
Piani’s attempt at a good-natured homage, instead, simply risks insulting Austen’s legacy.
