Love & Friendship

Synopsis:  Impecunious widow Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) aided by her friend, Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), set about finding a husband for her and her daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark),amongst their aristocratic circle of family and friends.

American writer-director Whit Stillman had some success on the art-house circuit in the ‘90s with a suite of talky comedies of contemporary manners (Metropolitan, 1990, Barcelona, 1994, and Last Days of Disco, 1998). Between then and now he has only directed one film, the talky Damsels In Distress (2011). Love & Friendship is, surprise, surprise, a talky film but with the significant difference of being set in early 18th century England (it is based on Jane Austen’s early novella."Lady Susan").  

Given the recognizable sameness of Stillman’s auteurial style to date the idea of moving from the salons of Manhattan to those of Regency England is an appealing one but despite the careful historical recreation the director shows no flair for the period or the material. There is, to pun somewhat, plenty of sense in his film but little sensibility. 

The film looks fabulous with a gorgeous production design with its stately homes with their plush interiors that particularly in the departments of costume design, hair and make-up is outstanding. But the plotting and pacing, not to mention the over-wrought dialogue, is flat, flat, flat. With such material one yearns for the panache and theatricality of Peter Greenway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and the acidulous thrust and parry of Stephen Frear’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Instead we get actors uttering lines of such contorted prolixity, more suited to the printed page than onscreen, that it must have consumed all their abilities just to remember them and get them out untangled (at times the words even appear superimposed on the screen and Stillman appears so pleased with his wit that he repeats some of his gags).

Kate Beckinsale does the heavy-lifting in terms of utterance and that in itself is to her credit but there is no real personality to her Lady Vernon. Whether being coquettish or cutting, inveigling or scheming, in private or public, her delivery remains the same. Could anyone be so consistently superficial and yet be interesting? Indeed the overall impression that all the players give is of actors playing actors playing characters seen in similar costume dramas. Chloë Sevigny with her American accent, although this is justified within the narrative, is a particularly insistent ill-fit (both she and Beckinsale had starred in Last Days of Disco). Only Tom Bennett in a delightful comedic turn as a rich aristocratic nit-wit actually manages to own his role. And if the performances lack bite, curiously most the dramatic action occurs off-screen with the characters, now in this drawing room, now that, commenting upon on it in flurries of verbal contrivance.  The resolution of Lady Susan’s manipulations, surely the major concern of the film, occurs off-screen and is related back to us in a few lines of pointed dialogue.

See Love & Friendship for the costumes and period settings but don’t expect to see the film’s title (which actually refers to one of Austen's earliest literary efforts, written when she was 14) realized before you in any substantial form.

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