Despite its title, Laura Piani’s endearing romantic-comedy Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is as much about nature as it is about literature. Amid its charming ruminations on books and writing and ambition and love, what comes through most vividly is a distinct sense of place. It begins amid the dense, cloistered shelves of Paris’s storied Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, but finds romantic entanglement against the damp foliage and dim light of southern England (though it was apparently shot entirely in France). It’s a movie about finding your place, and quite appropriately, it’s steeped in atmosphere.
The film presents its protagonist Agathe (played by Camille Rutherford, whom you might remember as the journalist from the opening scenes of Anatomy of a Fall) dancing by herself while working at Shakespeare & Co., stacking books and occasionally smiling at the poetic personals left by customers on little pieces of paper. (“You were wearing the burgundy dress and reading Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments on the first floor. My only regret is that I didn’t dare to speak to you.”) She lives with her sister and her young nephew; they’ve all been together ever since Agathe’s parents died in a horrific car crash. Although she’s a talented writer, Agathe doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with her hopes of becoming a proper author. So, her loyal friend Felix (Pablo Pauly), who clearly carries a torch for her, secretly sends an application on Agathe’s behalf to the Jane Austen Writing Residency, hosted in England by the descendants of the legendary author. She gets in, and agrees to go, reluctantly. (She does everything reluctantly.) Then, right before setting out on the ferry to cross the English Channel, she gives Felix a sudden, passionate kiss.
On the other side of the water, she’s met by Oliver (Charlie Anson), the slightly snotty son of the elderly couple who run the residency. Oliver seems judgmental, snide, terse. He admits he doesn’t even much care for Austen, despite being her great-great-great nephew; he’s more a Dickens man. (He looks and talks a bit like Hugh Grant — if Hugh Grant never smiled. Somehow, this is not a bad thing.) They keep running into each other in awkward circumstances, so it’s only a matter of time before Agathe finds herself in an Austenian conundrum between the brooding Oliver, to whom she’s clearly drawn, and the honest and likable Felix, to whom she’s already made an overture. This is the kind of sweet, romantic complication we used to get in movies all the time. Agathe says she’s living in the wrong century. She’s thinking, of course, about the 19th century, but the film itself feels out of place and out of time, in the best possible way.
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But this movie’s great strength isn’t its story, which is fairly predictable. Nor is it the dialogue, which can err on the obvious side, as themes and traits are bluntly articulated. “You’re scared of suffering, love affairs, one-night stands,” Felix tells Agathe. “You’re scared of apps. You’re scared. You don’t live. You just hide.” Not long after that, a writing teacher tells her, “You churn out cheap romances. It couldn’t hurt to try something else. You need to be in tune with the times.” Still, there’s purpose behind all this straight-forwardness. That’s the protagonist’s dilemma: She knows what all her dilemmas are.
To counter all this paralyzing introspection, Piani gradually conjures an irresistible mood of longing, there amid the rambling gardens of the residency. Wandering among the other members of the writing group — poets, thinkers, people who seem focused and determined — Agathe feels herself lacking, and her vulnerability gets to us. Rutherford is a great beauty, but she has a coarse insularity, the kind we might envision in someone like Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, to whom Agathe compares herself at one point, saying she’s “an old maid who has wilted like a flower in need of water.” (All this stuff really does sound better in French.) Agathe is concave in both posture and spirit, but she feels right for this muted world of amorous contemplation, of long, uncertain glances met by equally long, equally uncertain glances. By the end, romance in the abstract becomes something much more real — and we can’t help but fall for all these characters ourselves.
