French Austen inspired rom-com hits the mark

Regency author Jane Austen took her time getting there. She died all but unknown before building a following over the next two centuries that currently rivals Marvel Comics fans for obsessive enthusiasm.

Peak Jane-mania seems to be the last 20 years or so, with countless film and TV adaptations of her half-dozen books, and spinoffs like a French romcom called Jane Austen Wrecked My life.

It opens in the most famous English bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Co, where Agathe Robinson works while she tries to get her writing career started. Like Agathe, the actor playing her is Anglo-French – her name’s Camille Rutherford.

She works with her best friend Félix, who offers her career an unexpected kick-start.

Félix sends Agathe’s unfinished novel to a Jane Austen Residency, and they love it. Before taking off for England, the delighted Agathe gives Félix an unexpected kiss. Of gratitude, or something more?

While she’s deciding, she’s met by a glowering, saturnine Englishman, who’s her lift to the Residency.

Is he Mr Darcy perhaps? No, even better. Oliver’s a distant relation of Jane Austen herself, even if he claims not to be a fan.

In fact, Oliver turns out to be quite impossible, being both proud and prejudiced.

And it gets worse. Just as Agathe is sharing her criticism of her unsuitable new host to her sister in Paris, he reveals that he also speaks perfect French. Agathe has her nose rubbed in her lack of sense or sensibility.

Incidentally the French-speaking Englishman Oliver is played by one Charles Anson. And the rest of the guests at the residency seem equally adept at the French language.

It is, after all, a French movie, written and directed by Laura Piani. French she may be, but her love of Jane Austen is clearly the driving force in the story.

But which Jane Austen? Is this Pride and Prejudice, where the two haughty enemies suddenly discover their love? Is it Persuasion where love evades our heroine, leaving her to languish alone?

What about Emma, where the least-likely candidate turns out to be the love of her life?Remember that kiss with Felix?

Félix certainly remembers, and without warning he suddenly appears on the scene, at the very moment when Agathe and Darcy – I mean, Oliver – seem to be hotting up after a recent Jane Austen Ball.

Yes, there’s a ball, in full costume, not to mention the Residency stately home and a parade of colourful characters who, if not quite up to the standard of Mademoiselle Austen herself, amusingly fill in the blanks behind any potential romance.

Another aspect of the ironically titled Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is how much of the story is about writing and literature. Jane, you think, would approve.

As a sucker for most things Austen, of course I had a pretty good time. Though Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is possibly a good description of the audience for well-meaning homages like this.

Why can’t such a film ever be as good as the original, we complain?

It must be admitted the ending stumbles slightly before coming right.

But come right it does. And, as always when we find ourselves in Austen-land – even at one step removed - we’re reminded that just about every convention in romantic literature seems to derive from the six novels of a woman who died in 1817.

Listen to Simon Morris review the latest films in At The Movies, available here or on Sundays at 1.30pm on RNZ National.