The musical choices are also rather brilliant, suggesting a comic sense of doom when Lady Susan invades her next space during her manhunt for herself and her daughter. The homes and costumes are specific not just to the times, but show something of the characters and marriages Lady Susan invades. So often period films get so weighed down with historical detail that they fail to go that extra step and express deeper meaning. Love & Friendship embraces that detail, and always impressively. While Disco was period-set, it never felt time-specific. In fact, with the exception of Barcelona and its traveling buddy-comedy aspects, Love & Friendship is probably Stillman’s most visually ambitious film because of how it opens up the world. But all Stillman’s comedies of manners have essentially focused on what surrounds courtship in society, and the gatherings at deb parties, discos and colleges are treated no differently by Stillman than Austen’s parlor rooms and social gatherings. Metropolitan‘s Audrey has such love for Austen’s work that she is moved to tears seeing the author’s works in a thrift store window while feeling especially down. Stillman has clearly always liked and been inspired by Austen’s work, as she emerged frequently in his previous films. Stillman mines not only from Lady Susan, but Austen’s consistently overlooked skills as a humorist. After all, there’s nothing romantic about what anyone’s doing here. While most adaptions of Austen have focused on the romances of characters (although many have also been genuinely funny as well), Stillman essentially disregards the romances to focus exclusively on comedy. True love is far from her primary concern, and the hunt for a husband is as much about strategy and schemes as it is about actual attraction and romance. She is a fountain of “wisdom”, which shows a more cynical view of the world and women’s role in it. Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) is also perhaps the oldest of Austen’s heroines–a widow searching for a husband both for herself and her daughter, which significantly and logically changes her views of marriage. Lady Susan is perhaps the least-known of Austen’s novels and, as a novella written as letters, is structurally different from her best-known works. However, if you are a Whit Stillman fan ( Metropolitan, Barcelona, Last Days of Disco, and Damsels in Distress), consider this high praise: Love & Friendship is exactly what you would expect from Stillman adapting Jane Austen, focusing on some of the period’s absurdities of love, marriage and inheritance. If you truly dislike his humor and preoccupation with the bourgeois lifestyle’s preoccupation with codes of conduct, Love & Friendship might just not be your cup of tea.
It seems to me, if you like Whit Stillman’s films, you probably love them.
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