Intelligently adapting the monologues of Austen’s source material into dramatic dialogue (a scene between Reginald and his father, for example, conversationally intertwines Letters 12 and 14 of the novella), Stillman’s screenplay draws spicy cream from the milk of the author’s formal experiments.Ĭhloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in Love & Friendship, who also co-starred in Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco. She is a devilish delight, a femme fatale whose electrifying company we cannot help but craveīrilliantly described by the BBFC as containing “no material likely to harm or offend”, this acerbic U-certificate gem must be the most politely impolite film of the year. For the audience, she is a devilish delight, a femme fatale who believes “facts are horrid things” and whose electrifying company we cannot help but crave. For some, such as Emma Greenwell’s Catherine Vernon, Lady Susan is “a genius… diabolically so”, whose machinations must be halted at all costs. “Your renown precedes you,” Reginald cattily tells the coquettish Lady Susan upon her arrival, only to be handsomely slapped down with a skill and precision that will soon make him the lovesick slave of the target of his jibes.

Satirical title cards introduce us to a plethora of key players including Morfydd Clark’s Frederica Vernon, Susan’s “eligible daughter” Tom Bennett’s Sir James Martin, “her unintended” and “a bit of a rattle” and Xavier Samuel’s dashing Reginald DeCourcy, Charles’s handsome brother-in-law and the new focus of Lady Susan’s schemes. Stillman brings the slightly inaccessible source material to the big screen with crowd-pleasing panache The subtitle of the former was Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love, a delightfully ironic phrase that resonates somewhat with the narrative of the latter, a tale with which Stillman takes some delicious modern liberties as he brings the slightly inaccessible source material to the big screen with crowd-pleasing panache. Here, he draws on the title and plot respectively of two early epistolary works Love and Freindship (Stillman duly standardises the young Austen’s spelling) and Lady Susan. In 2003, he was reported to be working on a project called Winchester Races, which would marry material from the unfinished Austen novels The Watsons and Sanditon. Stillman’s 1990 debut feature Metropolitan drew inspiration from Mansfield Park, and his subsequent studies of social manners have all possessed an arch observational tone that one imagines Austen might have appreciated.

T here’s always been more than a touch of Jane Austen about the films of Whit Stillman, the incisive social satirist behind 1998’s The Last Days of Disco and 2011’s Damsels in Distress.

Whit stillman love and friendship