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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