At first sight Love and Friendship seems simple: a late eighteenth-century costume drama set in English country houses and London, from an unpublished novel by Jane Austen, ‘Lady Susan’. So, obviously a British film for the country house/period market. Second sight reveals something much more complicated. The production was financed by Arte (France), the Irish Film Board and the Netherlands Film Fund. No sign of British funding. Nor was it filmed in England, a.k.a. Austenland, but in Ireland, namely the Newbridge Estate in County Dublin and in Dublin itself. The actors and actresses it is true are British, except for the American Chloë Sevigny, but then she plays an American so that’s alright (but no Americans in the Austen novel, by the way). Nor is it directed by a British director, sensitive to all the class stuff going on and to what is unsaid and misinterpreted, but by Whit Stillman, an American, who seems perfectly attuned to all that British stuff. So, at third sight, the film returns to being utterly simple – clever and witty, in which production values do not overwhelm the film and allow it to strip away all the extras and focus on the narrative. It is Austen territory, but also the terroir of that remarkable late-18th-century sensibility of the modern era, Eric Rohmer. What is more it is aimed at a sophisticated global market and will surely do well there.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF AUSTENLAND
30 Monday May 2016
Posted cinema and culture, costume narratives
in
Glad you like this film, Tim – Patrick and I loved it too.
Interesting approach re the globalisation. I thought this was a most satisfying adaptation of a minor Austen.
Richard – I have to admit I’m rather unfamiliar with a number of the other Austen film/TV adaptations, partly out of a prejudice towards the all-purpose BBC costume drama set in a posh country house: quite as much about how they look as what they say. But Love and Friendship, while being very good to look at, is even more about the delicious social dynamics, which might be thought to appeal only to the British (the English, actually) but turn out to have a global appeal. Brilliant script and so clever to adapt an unread Austen (wh means the audience aren’t sitting there comparing the book and the film in their heads).
Around ten or more years ago the three big box-office hits were a Harry Potter film (set in an english preparatory school), one of the LOTR trilogy, informed by Tolkien’s saturation in the english class system, and a James Bond film, Bond being what I call a public-school cad. All fascinating to the English but these were global hits. Weird.
In one sense weird; in another quite brilliant…and like Shakespeare, Austen continues to excite contemporary culture around the globe. Nice chatting to you.