‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’ Review: A Mediocre Romantic Comedy
While Jane Austen Wrecked My Life Boasts Solid Performances, the array of subjects and themes it explores is far too underdeveloped to make a good movie.
Jane Austen-heads may enjoy the carefree nature of Laura Piani’s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie), and the associations the writer/director makes to some of the author’s most prolific works, including Pride & Prejudice and Love and Friendship. However, the film itself leaves much to be desired. It may be due to the sole fact that each thread that Piani introduces in her breezy 98-minute dramedy is barely explored, or perhaps to how uninteresting the film’s core “love” triangle gets developed as aspiring author Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) gets the opportunity of a lifetime to write at a Jane Austen residency.
Agathe has unprocessed trauma that has prevented her from traveling beyond the confines of her small town, which is easily navigable by her bicycle. It becomes revealed that she was the victim of a car accident with her parents, who both died instantly, and has since been reluctant to even step foot on a moving vehicle. These are difficult moments for the survivor of such a harrowing event, yet Piani plays them for laughs, frequently making her character vomit or smoke a thousand cigarettes to alleviate her anxieties. “Look how funny this is, she’s still traumatized by the event that killed her parents!” Already, none of the character choices Piani made sat right with me, especially when she constantly repeats the same vomit joke to get a chuckle out of the audience, when the situation itself isn’t funny, and should be treated with as much compassion as possible for her protagonist.
That said, when she arrives at the residency, the movie does begin to spark some interesting plot threads, notably the burgeoning romance between her and Oliver (Charlie Anson), Jane Austen’s great-great-great-great nephew, who finds her work overrated. Of course, there’s a playful sense of tension between the two (including one phone call where she speaks to her friend in French, thinking Oliver doesn’t understand her, but he also speaks the language, leading to some awkward sense of tension between the two) and some screwball-coded moments that are perfectly executed, which gives Jane Austen Wrecked My Life a bit of fun for what is an otherwise dour experience.
Whenever Rutherford and Anson are paired together, sparks fly. Anson possesses a natural sense of charm that pops off the screen every time he appears, making their relationship feel palpable and textured. Rutherford, who came onto the scene with a bit part in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, is also excellent throughout, regardless of the questionable choices Piani’s script fills the protagonist with. It at least gives some form of emotional investment in the story, because the rest of it, as poetically shot as it is, doesn’t work. There are far too many loose threads that are introduced as important, such as Oliver’s father (Alain Fairbarn) being in ill health, one of the writers (Lola Peploe) having trouble with her personal life, and a quasi-romance between Agathe and her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly), which gets quickly dropped and never mentioned again.
Piani seems interested in exploring a litany of subjects through the prism of Austen, particularly during a dance sequence that’s very much a visual (and thematic) reference to Pride & Prejudice. However, her screenplay unfortunately veers nowhere interesting, nor do her ideas amount to anything tangible, especially when the movie is laser-focused on developing the romance between Agathe and Oliver. This makes the overall viewing experience of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, while semi-enjoyable, not as worthwhile as one would hope, since the film seems uninterested in discussing anything it presents, other than the telegraphed conclusion we know the movie will reach as soon as Oliver is introduced on screen.
Credit where credit is due, however, Piani does not give Agathe the satisfaction she wants out of the time she spends in the writing residency, and, in turn, gives a much stronger ending than what most of us have envisioned. The presence of documentary legend Frederick Wiseman to give the final gut-punch certainly helps give the movie a missing puzzle piece and hammer its message home in ways that I didn’t expect. Those fleeting moments give Jane Austen Wrecked My Life a reason to exist and to stand out from the pack of (unfortunately dull) adaptations of her oeuvre within cinema, though I’ll admit Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice is as amazing as movies can get…