“Dear, our present comfortable state is at the most precarious sort. We don’t live, we visit.”
Those words are spoken by Lady Susan in the wickedly good “Love and Friendship” (2016). It is based on a posthumously published novella by my unofficial poet laureate of 2020 – Jane Austen. The precarious state she speaks about – the sort of limbo in which Austen female characters find themselves until they’re married to a man – feels like such a strong parallel to our status. It hit me that the past seven months cannot be fully described as ‘living’ – but we’ve been ‘visiting’ this new way of going about our days that doesn’t fully feel tangible. We are in a stasis. What’s truly emboldening about watching this work is how you’re aware that the world is constantly changing – and that we should all learn from Lady Susan, and her stratagems to take control of change.
It is adapted and directed by urbane satirist auteur Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan,” “Barcelona”) from a short epistolary Austen novel entitled “Lady Susan.” He borrowed the title from another unrelated early work because it would tie in with other well-known projects like “Pride & Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility.” There’s such vitality and a crackling sense of fun in his handling of this material. Stillman makes it less of a stately costume piece and more of frolicking con artist movie – think “The Sting” or “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” – but this time around we have Lady Susan and her confidante and accomplice Mrs. Johnson. This is playful entertainment, artfully crafted and performed, but without self-conscious artiness.
The fun begins when recently widowed Lady Susan has to abruptly depart from the Manwaring estate because she encouraged the attentions of the married Lord Manwaring. She and her unpaid companion Mrs. Cross head towards her brother-in-law’s estate to plot a way to get a suitable match for her young daughter Frederica as well as for herself. “I have no money and no husband,” she tells Mrs. Cross in the carriage. “Well, in one’s plight, they say, is one’s opportunity. Not that I would ever think in opportunistic terms.” Her brother-in-law’s wife – Catherine – is wary of Lady Susan’s reputation, and despite her apprehensions, her own brother – Charles – starts to be smitten with Lady Susan. His family opposes the relationship. Charles stands up for her and against the calumnies spoken about her. He poignantly tells his father “I know you spend little time in society. Should you have frequented it more, you’d know the astonishing degree of vile, hateful jealousy in our country.“
In the interim, Frederica runs away and gets expelled from the boarding school her mother cannot afford. She shows up at Churchill and is followed by admiring Sir James Martin, who is as foolish as he is rich. When he’s corrected that there are only ten commandments instead of twelve, he hilariously replies “Really, Only ten must be obeyed? Excellent. Well, then, which two to take off?” To Frederica’s disappointment, her mother intends to pair her with him. “He has offered you the one thing he has of value to give…his income,” Lady Susan exhalts. There’s also the American, Mrs. Johnson – who is Lady Susan’s co-conspirator in her scheming. She is married to the much senior but rich Mr. Johnson out of convenience. “What a mistake you made marrying Mr. Johnson,” Lady Susan comments. “Too old to be governable, too young to die.”
Unlike other Austen romantic heroines, Lady Susan is pragmatic and calculating. “This is the incomprehension of the rich and easeful,” she argues. “You can afford to take the high ground, and add another layer to your pride.”
Stillman’s direction is impeccable. He sets the tone with the musical choices. There’s a harp that plays at the beginning quickly followed by a military drum roll as the action unfolds – and he introduces each character at the top with an iris surrounding them and a sardonic comment about who they are. He frames scenes as if we’re spying on the characters through doorways. He also delineates Lady Susan’s trajectory through her costumes. Note how she starts only wearing black, but the moment in the narrative when her plot is in motion and working, she will appear wearing a red dress. In comparison, the other women wear clothing and colors that make them look like ornaments. Kate Beckinsale is absolutely delicious as Lady Susan. Her line readings are full of double meaning. Tom Bennett as the hysterical Sir James threatens to steal the movie right out of her hands.
Lady Susan: “Isn’t it rather clear that is we, women of decision, who hold the trumps?”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Amazon Prime and to rent on iTunes.
Screenplay by Whit Stillman
Based on the novel “Lady Susan” by Jane Austen
Directed by Whit Stillman
Starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenwell, Morfydd Clark, Jemma Redgrave, Tom Bennett, James Fleet, Justin Edwards, Jenn Murray, Stephen Fry and Chloë Sevigny
90 minutes
Director and Writer Whit Stillman on “Love & Friendship”
“…I’d always been interested in Jane Austen and I did the first three films, they were the only things in my life that were a bit cinematic, I thought. So, I thought I’d just write tonnes of original scripts and stories, and then went in sort of using experiences I knew about, and moments I’d lived, that seemed of some interest cinematically. But after the three films I sort of realised I’d come to the end of the road. I was looking for things to adapt and work on and I had, you know, different projects, different stories. I was living in Paris and trying to set them up out of England, and a lot of those things are difficult where there are a lot of people involved and you’ve sort of optioned a novel and it has to be done within two years or you lose the rights or have to buy the book. In that period of sort of struggling within the film system, even if it were the UK film system, I discovered ‘Lady Susan.’ I thought, “This is wonderful, this hasn’t been done, I didn’t know about this. It’s really funny, it’s her sort of channeling Oscar Wilde.” It seemed like a really unlikely project, it was not fully completed in her terms, and you know, sure, an epistolary. But I showed it around to theatrical friends to see if there was a dramatisable story in there, and they thought it was promising. So I started working on it, a little with the idea that it would take a long time to see if it could be dramatised into a film. And, immediately I discovered there was another competing project, which terrified me because I’ve had that before with ‘Last Days of Disco,’ there had been a film called ‘54;’ that was our nemesis.” (sbs.com)
Stillman on Adapting “Lady Susan” into “Love & Friendship”
“…I had the contract to do the novel very early, and I was supposed to prepare it from the script before I started shooting and let them have it so they could bring it out in good time. But I didn’t, I was too busy before I shot, so I started working on it after picture lock. And I was glad I did, because the Sir James Martin character had become very important, there were a lot of new scenes. And this sort of Martin voice got into my head. So it’s all written from the point of view of Sir James Martin’s nephew, Rufus Martin-Colonna, and he’s quite peculiar in his point of view. He’s defending his aunt and uncle and turning everything around. So it’s a bit of a game, the novel, but it worked out and it’s considered funny and people enjoy it. He’s quite a comical character. And to satisfy anyone who’s worried about losing everything in the Jane Austen original, we include that, we include the full text of the Jane Austen original, as a sort of appendix, as a block of evidence which he comments on. So if people want to see the difference between the film’s story, or the Rufus Martin-Colonna story, and the actual spinster authoress story, it’s all there to be found. It’s a two-for-one, it’s actually a three-for-one offer. The novel’s a very good deal. It’s published, I think the edition you’ll get in Australia is from Jane Austen’s publishers, so the John Murray press were the publishers for her last books and they’re also the publisher for our novel.” (sbs.com)
Casting “Love & Friendship”
…Stillman knew he wanted Beckinsale to play the role way back in the early nineties…“One of the advantages of not having financing and struggling for financing is that you have a really long casting process,” Stillman told the crowd. But that process always seemed to revert back to Beckinsale. “In the case of Kate, there’s a sort of history with Jane Austen and Kate [already],” he continued. “It was off ‘Cold Comfort Farm,’ which is derived from Jane Austen’s ‘Emma,’ but in the latter day time, that I saw her and started thinking, while I was writing ‘Last Days of Disco,’ that [the character of] Charlotte should be Kate Beckinsale. And then, when I found the ‘Lady Susan’ novella, one of the things that made me think this could be a movie is that, ‘Well, Kate could play that part really well.’ Unfortunately, at that point, Kate was still like 26 or 27.” Thinking that the project would take wing far sooner than it did, Stillman conceded that he had “to have someone else like Kate, but I knew Kate could play that.” “He was waiting for me to age,” Beckinsale laughed. The film reunites not only Beckinsale and Stillman, but also fellow actress Chloe Sevigny, who starred alongside Beckinsale in Stillman’s 1998 “The Last Days of Disco” and recently toplined the filmmaker’s episodic outing “The Cosmopolitans.” For the trio, the opportunity to come back together was a well worth the wait — and Beckinsale believes it only made the work all the better. “A million years later, when everyone’s really old and everything, you get back and it’s now, ‘We’re in Britain, we’re doing Jane Austen,’” she laughed. “I was a literature student at Oxford, so it’s much more my comfort zone. It would have been better if we had done it the other way around! It’s so amazing to get the chance to come back and work with someone when you have all that life in between.” (indiewire.com)
Kate Beckinsale on Lady Susan Vernon
“…when I was sent this screenplay, I sort of assumed that Whit Stillman had written a screenplay in the style of Jane Austen because the material’s not really what you expect from Jane Austen. It’s extremely edgy and sort of envelope-pushing and very, very funny…I mean – obviously, she is a bit conniving and duplicitous. I’m very fond of her, but I’m also – do kind of see her very much in the context of the time period that she was in and, you know, as a woman with the constraints imposed on her ability to get an amazing education or a really fulfilling career or, you know, have independent means that weren’t just reliant on having a husband who had money. You know, within those confines, she’s being as creative as she possibly can in terms of having freedom. And I suppose on the surface, you kind of think she’s this kind of terrible manipulative nightmare. But actually, within the context socially, I think she’s a bit of a pioneer…I was – it was such a wonderful script and such a wonderful character. And also, there was something really special about knowing that we as a cast were the first people to inhabit these characters onscreen, which I think, you know, for being in a Jane Austen adaptation, I don’t know if there’s anybody under the age of about 200 who can say that (laughter), you know. But this one is a sort of lurking, secret gem that nobody had really touched yet.” (npr.org)
About Director and Co-Writer Whit Stillman
It was during Christmas break in 1969 that Whit Stillman discovered debutante parties. He was hating Harvard. His parents had divorced and his economic circumstances — and his life — had changed. He wasn’t summering in Cape Cod anymore. There wasn’t Dad’s Cornwall-on-the-Hudson place for weekends. Just the year before, his last year at boarding school, he’d decided to change his politics too: “I developed,” he says, “this sort of anachronistic, 19th-century socialist ideology.” Stuck in New York over the holidays in his mother’s apartment, he despaired. He felt isolated and wasn’t into parties, he says. He was used to wearing camouflage, not evening clothes. “Then some girls,” he says, “needed extra escorts. I was somewhat needed. I got invited to a couple of parties. Then boom! I became part of this group. It was my salvation that year.” Stillman is the director of “Metropolitan,” a bargain-basement study of the American upper class — or, as he has tagged them, the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie…It’s about a Princeton freshman, Tom Townsend, who’s stuck in New York over Christmas — in his mother’s apartment, on the dreaded west side of Central Park. He’s invited to a deb party, and by the end of season he’s no longer renting tails because he’s purchased them. He also moves from reading Lionel Trilling’s criticism of Jane Austen to actually reading her books. His year, it appears, might be saved. It’s Stillman’s first film, after many years of poring over self-help filmmaking books and screenwriting how-tos. He wrote it. He produced it. He directed it. He lived it…His father’s family came to Connecticut in the 1680s as “Puritan refugees,” he says. He describes his mother’s family in Philadelphia as having lost its money during the Depression and as “tangentially social.” “My parents were into this heavy political trip,” he says. “They sort of came from this background, and yet they were very liberal and progressive — and conservative — like a package deal. They were liberal Democrats, Unitarians and everything. We went to Chilmark on the Vineyard, not Edgartown…Stillman worked in publishing in New York — at Doubleday — out of Harvard, and eventually took over his uncle’s illustration agency. He works there still — at Riley Illustration — as do his sister and wife, who’s from Barcelona. They live with their daughter in Manhattan.
As a boy he spent several years in Washington, during the Truman and Kennedy administrations. His father, John Sterling Stillman, would come for political appointments. From 1961 to ’65, he lived in Georgetown. “I went to a school called Potomac, across the river,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t go to St. Albans. I met kids from St. Albans afterwards and they were really funny, eccentric people.” Not all of them. “No. But Potomac was too sort of suburban Virginia,” he says. “Too much of a shock.” Expectations. Girls in his movie rustle around in taffeta and Mother’s perfectly matched 8-millimeter pearls. They say “ciao” for goodbye. They sound like Eleanor Roosevelt. They talk about their year in France. The family apartment has an elevator that opens into it. The guys — slick hair, hard lips, tortoise-shell glasses, throaty Eastern city voices — have a couple of very simple costume changes: evening clothes (please don’t say tuxedo) and, outside, chesterfields over evening clothes…He shot “Metropolitan” in friends’ town houses, and town houses of friends of friends. “I don’t want to do people in black tie,” he says now, “for the next 10 films.” It took him four years — while holding a day job — to write it. “And I procrastinated,” he says…(washingtonpost.com)…A few of his other works include “Barcelona” (1994), “The Heart of a Saturday Night” (1996), “The Last Days of Disco” (1998), “Damsels in Distress” (2011) and Love & Friendship (2014).