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‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’ Review: A Delectable Modern Rom-Com Reassesses the Appeal of Past Love Stories
Great literature sets unrealistic expectations for mere mortals. Laura Piani’s debut balances reality with the effervescent charm of vintage swooners.
Presented as a light-hearted farce, complete with characters stepping (naked) through the wrong doors and a tense cross-country ride, in which Agathe complains in French (not realizing her companion speaks the language), the film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship. Blocked in both love and literature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is an exasperated French woman working at Shakespeare and Company, the adorably cluttered English-language bookstore situated just a few meters from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Rutherford is far from the dime-a-dozen ingénues so often seen in French movies, with their voluptuous figures and vacant expressions, looking simultaneously innocent and sexually enticing — and so much the better, as it sets an unrealistic standard for young women to aspire to, while casting them opposite gargoyle-like men.
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