LOVE & FRIENDSHIP ***
Whit Stillman
2016
IDEA: Following the death of her wealthy husband, Lady Susan, "the biggest flirt in all England," arrives at her sister-in-law's manor and concocts a devious plan.
BLURB: Love & Friendship is a union of two artists magnifying and bolstering the qualities of one another, Whit Stillman revealing the bitter bite of Jane Austen and Austen sharpening the hyper-verbal, mercilessly unsentimental snap of Stillman. The match is scarily right: Austen’s novella becomes for Stillman a dryly scathing comedy of manners with hardly a room for breath, each astringent, scrupulously tailored line of dialogue at once cutting through the folly of aristocratic social ritual and compounding its exhausting gamesmanship. Nobody plays the game better than Lady Susan, a role Kate Beckinsale relishes as she rattles off reams of primly disparaging incriminations without batting an eyelash. It’s all subterfuge all the time, and Beckinsale’s handling of her deceitful verbosity is as likely to give audiences whiplash as the characters she unashamedly deploys it against. Even at a little over 90 minutes this can grow wearying, but Stillman’s propensity for playfully curt cadences typically keeps things from becoming too overbearing. And while anything resembling compassion seems entirely absent from Lady Susan’s actions, Stillman nevertheless honors the audacity of a woman who wins with baldly mendacious words, whose scheming and haughtiness are symptoms of a rigged world of privilege she’s found a way to use against itself. It’s a character invented by Austen and realized by Stillman as another of his blithely self-deluded heroines.
