Jane Austen a gâché ma vie

Some movies you wish are shorter. Others, longer. This one belongs in the latter category. The characters are introduced, we learn a little about them, and then we move on. Too many conversations start but don't end. And always when they get interesting. We learn about a host who is in decline but still active with gardening and conversation, for example.

The acting works for the screenplay. While short, nothing is forced. Nothing is contrived, either. Everything that happens here doesn't elicit any disbelief.

However, the movie works on light hearted charm. You care about who you learn about. The laughs are all honest. And there's a ball. I hope the director's next film is longer.

It's a romantic comedy set in Paris, southern England and a French vacation home in modern times. Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) runs a Paris bookshop specializing in classical English literature with her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly). Agathe is a fragile person devoted to her literary father's memory (she survived the car accident that killed her parents) and her desire to write a novel in the manner of Jane Austen. She has written some chapters but is stuck.

Félix arranges for her to be invited to a Jane Austen Residency on property belonging to a distant descendant of the Austen family. There, she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), a professor in contemporary literature and the son of Todd (Alan Fairbairn) and Beth (Liz Crowther), who run the Residency.

"Jane Austen a gâché ma vie" tracks Agathe's efforts at the Residency and her complex relationships with Oliver and Félix. By the end, there is a resolution.

"Jane Austen a gâché ma vie" is a slow-paced yet engaging movie. Camille Rutherford and Charlie Anson provide the most interesting and developed characters. Pablo Pauly's character is less defined. The other Residency attendees fill slots in a literary film. It's not a laugh-out-loud comedy, but the low-key approach works surprisingly well.

"Nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love." Wordsworth

Around Regency England Jane Austen began to rule romantic literature with her witty deconstruction of upper-class pretentions and wise advice about how to find love and/or fortune. With the 250th anniversary of her birth, the film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a low-key Austen modernization that depicts a young book seller, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), who can't break her writer's block or find love. Yet, she has a disposition given to "acts of kindness and love."

While she has a womanizing co-worker, Felix (Pablo Pauly), who apparently loves her, she won't give herself to him out of diffidence, good sense, and plain cluelessness. He signs her up for a Jane Austen Residency at a posh estate in Britain (all shot in France), where it looks like she will fail again to be inspired to write. It's not unknown that meeting new people, including seasoned writers, helps to mitigate the block and renew a zest for life; for Agathe, it will be a slow burn, her very name suggesting "a gate."

This lyrical French rom-com, with alternating subtitles, is a treat for a cool summer evening when you are ready to be seduced by French joie de vivre and an art film that uses no CGI, relies on insights about love and writing fitting to Austen herself, and sometimes dips into old-fashioned screwball comedy or plain old-fashioned pratfalls. A bit of vaudeville, I'd say, such as when she, naked, stumbles into the room of Oliver (Charlie Anson), a distant relative of Austen and for whom romance with Agathe has potential.

There's even a formal ball, in the Austen spirit, and Agathe shines like the actress Anne Hathaway, slender and charming. Emerging into a woman less like Austen's Emma and more like Elizabeth Bennet.

All in all, not much happens in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life but a tardy romance, just right for light, summer cinema and fitting for the immortal Jane Austen on her anniversary.

I had seen the trailer at least five times, so I knew what to expect when I snuck in for my third film of the day. This movie is a small gem, a European romantic comedy without Hugh Grant or Colin Firth. Agathe is stuck in a rut. Her parents died in a car accident with her in it. She now has a car phobia. She lives with her sister, who sleeps around and brings them home. She has a platonic relationship with her Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company coworker Felix. They end up kissing on the dock after he secretly enters her for a Jane Austen writing residency in England. This is somehow the same plot device contained in Broadway's one woman show, Call Me Izzy. JA's great great great grandson picks her up. She vomits all over him. Needless to say, they will fall in love and Agathe becomes suddenly embroiled in a romantic triangle. Camille Rutherford is unconventionally pretty and funny as the lead. Charlie Anson nicely handles his intellectual hunk Oliver assignment. Pablo Pauly is good as the Casanova coworker. Frederick Wiseman has a nice cameo as a poet at the end. It's just a sweet, pleasant and relaxing film to spend a hundred minutes with on a weekend. Writer and director Laura Piani has secured her artistic future. My audience and I were enthralled.

For me, one of the weaknesses of the film was that although most of it was set in England, it was all filmed in France. A French chateau does not look like an English country house, which gave it an artificial feeling.

It was OK, but didn't convince. Perhaps they tried to include too many story lines, such as a childhood trauma, complicated family, man with dementia, etc, which didn't add anything to the story. This left too little time for the romance to blossom realistically.