Read more: Jane Austen at the disco
A young lady entering high society must navigate scheming mothers, interfering aunts and proud men. Her prize? Romance and a suitable spouse. Whit Stillman’s new film Love and Friendship—adapted from an early Jane Austen novella—has all the ingredients of a typical Regency costume drama. But at the story’s heart is not shy young Frederica (Morfydd Clark) searching for a husband, but the bolder sallies of her widowed mother, Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale)—“the most accomplished flirt in all England.”
Stillman has long been an Austen fan. In his Oscar-nominated film Metropolitan (1989), a preppy comedy of manners, the budding young lovers argue over Lionel Trilling’s famous essay on Mansfield Park. The characters in his later films—set at the height of disco fever, in Barcelona at the end of the Cold War and an all-female college—speak in the refined cadences of 18th-century moralists, debating manners and virtue with often biting wit. So it seemed inevitable that Stillman would eventually turn to the source of his inspiration.
Stillman is faithful to his source. Austen’s novella, known as Lady Susan, centres on the haughty but impoverished widow’s attempt to marry off her reluctant daughter Frederica, while she spins a web of suitors for herself. The most prominent of her prey is Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel). At first he disapproves of her, but is eventually charmed by her false modesty. Stillman’s film inventively captures the source-novel’s epistolatory style: at one point DeCourcy’s father reads out a letter, tediously including all the punctuation. Many of the best lines are paraphrased from Austen: “Facts are such horrid things!” Lady Susan exclaims, when her schemes hit a snag. Mr Johnson, the husband of her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny), is sadly “too old to be governable, too young to die.” After he forbids the two women from meeting, Lady Susan utters a double-edged prayer: “May Mr Johnson’s next gouty attack end favourably!”
To Stillman’s credit his original lines are difficult to distinguish from Austen’s. “But marriage is for one’s whole life!” insists Frederica, looking for a way out of the match her mother has planned with the “vastly rich, rather simple” Sir James Martin. “Not in my experience” her mother sniffs.
The heroine of Metropolitan defends Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price: “What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?” She may be right, but Love and Friendship makes an excellent case for a wicked lead. Beckinsale hits every note perfectly, capturing Susan’s unabashed egoism and crackling charm. Susan is an older version of Beckinsale’s waspish character Charlotte in The Last Days of Disco. That film also starred Sevigny as her friend Alicia. But while Sevigny took the lead in The Last Days of Disco, in Love and Friendship the eye is always drawn to Beckinsale’s Susan.
Stillman serves up Susan with affection and even admiration. When Reginald protests that he can’t understand why Susan wishes to marry her daughter to Sir James, she slips into a rare moment of honesty, castigating him for having “the ‘incomprehension’ of the rich and easeful,” and for failing to realise “the full extent of ridiculous manhood a young girl without fortune” must endure. The line is not one of Austen’s originals, but it easily could have been. Austen’s business-like concern with securing appropriately wealthy suitors for her heroines shines through here. So does her sharp sympathy for women such as Susan who find themselves—as Austen herself did—in financial straits, dependent on male relatives for support.
Susan has much in common with one of Austen’s other heroines, Emma—whose creator famously deemed her a character “whom no one but myself will much like.” Both are shallow, self-interested, and firmly convinced of the correctness of their own opinions and actions. But while Emma aspires to do the right thing for those around her, Susan is unapologetic about her material—and carnal—ambitions. Though she may try to deceive others about her intentions, Lady Susan is never less than honest with herself about her determination to arrange things to suit her own desires. She brushes off her lover’s wife with ease: “if she was going to be jealous she should not have married such a charming man.” Yet this unabashed opportunism is precisely what makes her so compelling. She is determined to make things happen, and is consequently always the most interesting person in any scene, with many of the film’s wittiest lines to boot. “Only you and I stand innocent of reading other people’s correspondence!” she exclaims to her friend Alicia, when a letter inadvertently reveals her adultery to one of the men involved.
Loyalty sits at the heart of the film: to parents, friends and lovers. Reginald’s father warns him about marrying Susan: “It would be the death of the honest pride with which we’ve always considered you.” Susan, loyal to no interests besides her own, provides a shallow echo to this heartfelt plea when she reproaches Frederica for not obeying her wishes, citing the commandment to honour your father and mother.
Frederica tussles with her loyalty to her scheming mother. A chance conversation with a clergyman offers a clue to Stillman’s view. (Typically counter-intuitive, he makes the country parson—a figure of mockery even in Austen—a voice of suggestive truth.) He enthuses about the “sentiment of gratitude and loyalty,” in the fifth commandment, pointing to the trinity described by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten—“Good, Truth and Beauty”—as a way “to apply this sentiment… to every aspect of our lives.” Loyalty is not a simple matter of obedience; but the importance of honouring “those who have gone before us,” and the good, truth and beauty they have generated, is not to be taken lightly.
Stillman’s interest in religion runs throughout his work. In a powerfully odd scene from Barcelona, a character dances to Glenn Miller while reading the Old Testament. It is that creative friction, between delight in the physical world and an appreciation for loftier themes, that give Stillman’s films their weight—and lightness. In The Last Days of Disco, Beckinsale’s character Charlotte gives an unexpectedly stirring rendition of Amazing Grace in an attempt to outdo another character. Though the hymn is ill-intentioned it takes on a transcendent quality, continuing in the background beyond that scene and touching everyone in the film—including Charlotte herself—with grace. Lady Susan, like Charlotte, is an example of the goodness, truth and beauty that can even be found even at the hands of scheming mothers and terrible friends.
For all her bite, Lady Susan’s punches do not often land, and rarely bruise. Her threat is limited and this makes it all the more enjoyable. Susan’s attempts to foist a wealthy idiot on her daughter go awry, and end up working to the benefit of most of those involved. As one character observes, human love “partakes of the divine: the heart is an instrument we possess but do not truly know.” But while Lady Susan may be the antithesis of the Old Testament’s virtuous Susannah, she is no less triumphant in the end.
Watch a clip from Love and Friendship
A young lady entering high society must navigate scheming mothers, interfering aunts and proud men. Her prize? Romance and a suitable spouse. Whit Stillman’s new film Love and Friendship—adapted from an early Jane Austen novella—has all the ingredients of a typical Regency costume drama. But at the story’s heart is not shy young Frederica (Morfydd Clark) searching for a husband, but the bolder sallies of her widowed mother, Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale)—“the most accomplished flirt in all England.”
Stillman has long been an Austen fan. In his Oscar-nominated film Metropolitan (1989), a preppy comedy of manners, the budding young lovers argue over Lionel Trilling’s famous essay on Mansfield Park. The characters in his later films—set at the height of disco fever, in Barcelona at the end of the Cold War and an all-female college—speak in the refined cadences of 18th-century moralists, debating manners and virtue with often biting wit. So it seemed inevitable that Stillman would eventually turn to the source of his inspiration.
Stillman is faithful to his source. Austen’s novella, known as Lady Susan, centres on the haughty but impoverished widow’s attempt to marry off her reluctant daughter Frederica, while she spins a web of suitors for herself. The most prominent of her prey is Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel). At first he disapproves of her, but is eventually charmed by her false modesty. Stillman’s film inventively captures the source-novel’s epistolatory style: at one point DeCourcy’s father reads out a letter, tediously including all the punctuation. Many of the best lines are paraphrased from Austen: “Facts are such horrid things!” Lady Susan exclaims, when her schemes hit a snag. Mr Johnson, the husband of her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny), is sadly “too old to be governable, too young to die.” After he forbids the two women from meeting, Lady Susan utters a double-edged prayer: “May Mr Johnson’s next gouty attack end favourably!”
To Stillman’s credit his original lines are difficult to distinguish from Austen’s. “But marriage is for one’s whole life!” insists Frederica, looking for a way out of the match her mother has planned with the “vastly rich, rather simple” Sir James Martin. “Not in my experience” her mother sniffs.
The heroine of Metropolitan defends Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price: “What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?” She may be right, but Love and Friendship makes an excellent case for a wicked lead. Beckinsale hits every note perfectly, capturing Susan’s unabashed egoism and crackling charm. Susan is an older version of Beckinsale’s waspish character Charlotte in The Last Days of Disco. That film also starred Sevigny as her friend Alicia. But while Sevigny took the lead in The Last Days of Disco, in Love and Friendship the eye is always drawn to Beckinsale’s Susan.
Stillman serves up Susan with affection and even admiration. When Reginald protests that he can’t understand why Susan wishes to marry her daughter to Sir James, she slips into a rare moment of honesty, castigating him for having “the ‘incomprehension’ of the rich and easeful,” and for failing to realise “the full extent of ridiculous manhood a young girl without fortune” must endure. The line is not one of Austen’s originals, but it easily could have been. Austen’s business-like concern with securing appropriately wealthy suitors for her heroines shines through here. So does her sharp sympathy for women such as Susan who find themselves—as Austen herself did—in financial straits, dependent on male relatives for support.
Susan has much in common with one of Austen’s other heroines, Emma—whose creator famously deemed her a character “whom no one but myself will much like.” Both are shallow, self-interested, and firmly convinced of the correctness of their own opinions and actions. But while Emma aspires to do the right thing for those around her, Susan is unapologetic about her material—and carnal—ambitions. Though she may try to deceive others about her intentions, Lady Susan is never less than honest with herself about her determination to arrange things to suit her own desires. She brushes off her lover’s wife with ease: “if she was going to be jealous she should not have married such a charming man.” Yet this unabashed opportunism is precisely what makes her so compelling. She is determined to make things happen, and is consequently always the most interesting person in any scene, with many of the film’s wittiest lines to boot. “Only you and I stand innocent of reading other people’s correspondence!” she exclaims to her friend Alicia, when a letter inadvertently reveals her adultery to one of the men involved.
Loyalty sits at the heart of the film: to parents, friends and lovers. Reginald’s father warns him about marrying Susan: “It would be the death of the honest pride with which we’ve always considered you.” Susan, loyal to no interests besides her own, provides a shallow echo to this heartfelt plea when she reproaches Frederica for not obeying her wishes, citing the commandment to honour your father and mother.
Frederica tussles with her loyalty to her scheming mother. A chance conversation with a clergyman offers a clue to Stillman’s view. (Typically counter-intuitive, he makes the country parson—a figure of mockery even in Austen—a voice of suggestive truth.) He enthuses about the “sentiment of gratitude and loyalty,” in the fifth commandment, pointing to the trinity described by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten—“Good, Truth and Beauty”—as a way “to apply this sentiment… to every aspect of our lives.” Loyalty is not a simple matter of obedience; but the importance of honouring “those who have gone before us,” and the good, truth and beauty they have generated, is not to be taken lightly.
Stillman’s interest in religion runs throughout his work. In a powerfully odd scene from Barcelona, a character dances to Glenn Miller while reading the Old Testament. It is that creative friction, between delight in the physical world and an appreciation for loftier themes, that give Stillman’s films their weight—and lightness. In The Last Days of Disco, Beckinsale’s character Charlotte gives an unexpectedly stirring rendition of Amazing Grace in an attempt to outdo another character. Though the hymn is ill-intentioned it takes on a transcendent quality, continuing in the background beyond that scene and touching everyone in the film—including Charlotte herself—with grace. Lady Susan, like Charlotte, is an example of the goodness, truth and beauty that can even be found even at the hands of scheming mothers and terrible friends.
For all her bite, Lady Susan’s punches do not often land, and rarely bruise. Her threat is limited and this makes it all the more enjoyable. Susan’s attempts to foist a wealthy idiot on her daughter go awry, and end up working to the benefit of most of those involved. As one character observes, human love “partakes of the divine: the heart is an instrument we possess but do not truly know.” But while Lady Susan may be the antithesis of the Old Testament’s virtuous Susannah, she is no less triumphant in the end.
Watch a clip from Love and Friendship
