Though the novels of Jane Austen positively drip with witticisms, catty descriptive asides and zingy ironies, their film versions all too often tend to soft-sell the comedy. Emma Thompson’s elegant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was wry and knowing, though only the most hopeful of high-school English teachers would argue for it as genuinely side-splitting; Joe Wright’s take on Pride and Prejudice played up swooning romance over barbed interplay. Both the Paltrow- and Taylor-Joy-starring iterations of Emma are light, pastel-hued baubles, but more feathery than they are genuinely funny; the laughs only came with a rewrite as drastic as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.
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. 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. 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. To watch him work through her is to make you wonder how prime Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder might have tackled the author.
