On film, she’s the tastiest of characters – queen bee, black widow and femme fatale, all in fabulous millinery to boot – and a career-crowning role for Kate Beckinsale, who to that point had been languishing in one anonymous B-thriller and Underworld installment after another. If the book’s letter-based structure revealed Lady Susan’s moral dubiousness first-hand through her caustic, withering tone, Stillman’s film fleshes out a wider world at her feet, warming her up a little in the process. A young widow striving and seducing her way through the upper classes, she aims to both get the guy and thwart The Man, using her own gormless daughter as a decoy if it gets her closer to the prize. Its title character is a gleefully unscrupulous heroine and villainess in one, irresistible in her self-serving wit and cleverness. A work of juvenilia, but not published until a half-century after Austen’s death, Lady Susan is an epistolary trifle that differs from her better-known novels in its anti-romantic outlook and cynical preoccupation with bad behaviour gone largely unpunished. That it achieves this by adapting one of the author’s own least essential works is a testament to Stillman’s resourcefulness as a writer, as well as the general maxim that minor literature is often better served on screen than major. A corset comedy made with a springy screwball sensibility and the darkly venal undertow of Dangerous Liaisons, it is, for my money, the best Jane Austen film made to date. Released six years ago now, it has since acquired the older-feeling patina of easy rewatchability insufficiently seen and celebrated at the time, it deserves to become a comfort-watching standard. In lieu of such hypotheticals, Love & Friendship will do very nicely indeed.
To watch him work through her is to make you wonder how prime Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder might have tackled the author.
Known for his ultra-arch, hyper-literate satires of preppy, privileged pockets of east coast society – from his Oscar-nominated debut Metropolitan to his peculiar spin on the campus comedy, Damsels in Distress – Stillman has something of Austen’s gift for smuggling razor-edged observations in silky formalities.
When it was announced that Whit Stillman was adapting Austen’s relatively obscure, posthumous published novella Lady Susan, the marriage seemed almost too perfectly arranged, even if Stillman is as Waspishly American as Austen was Waspishly English. Love & Friendship, then, is a delicious rarity: an Austen interpretation taken on by an established, distinctive comic film-maker, bent to his cockeyed sensibility even as it honours the zesty, cutting hilarity of the original text.
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