Swiping left on Mr Darcy
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad
Is it still possible to make a great romcom? Perhaps not in a contemporary setting. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a new, low-budget French film and the debut feature of its scriptwriter and director Laura Piani, illuminatingly tests the proposition to destruction.
No first-rate romcoms have appeared for years, at least compared to their heyday in the Long Nineties. Four Weddings and a Funeral appeared in 1994, Notting Hill in 1999, Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001. In the US, Nora Ephron's classic trilogy, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, ran from 1989 to 1998. As for the romcoms of Jane Austen herself, both Emma Thompson's brilliant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and the spiffy updating of Emma, Clueless, were released in 1995.
Thirty years ago, the fundamental premise of the romcom still made sense, more or less. The historical inflections of Austen's world, in which questions of class and inheritance are inescapable and, for a woman, the chance of marriage everything, had long gone – but versions of these plots could still be made to matter. 'You don't think people are still concerned with marriage, money, romance, finding a partner?' demanded Emma Thompson back then.
They were, of course, and they still are – but it's that last phrase that's the killer. In Austen's novels, and in romcoms generally, there were few opportunities to meet eligible partners: pretty much all encounters were meet-cutes, that staple of the genre. Random fortune, the great question of who bumps into whom, remained important until… when? The first online dating app, Match.com, started in 1995 too. Grindr, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and the rest have only been around 15 years or less. But in that time, they have stuffed the romcom, obliterating its key intrigue.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life tries to revive the genre but ends up proving it passé. Agathe (tall, gawky, glorious Camille Rutherford), single, in her thirties, works in the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris, while trying to write novels herself. She is scarred by the death of her parents in a car crash six years previously.
A pal at the bookshop, Félix (Pablo Pauly), himself a proficient dating app-user, often stays over. But Agathe hasn't had sex with anyone for two years. 'What are you waiting for? Mark Darcy?' Félix asks her. 'I'm not into Uber sex, I don't do digital, I don't want to 'like' guys,' Agathe retorts. She's more a Jane Austen fan, diagnosing herself as Anne Elliot in Persuasion, 'an old maid who has wilted like a flower in need of water', while Félix is Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, 'a liar and seducer'. In short, she is not living in the right century, she confesses.
Happily, thanks to Félix's support, she wins a fortnight's stay at a writer's retreat, the Jane Austen Writers' Residency, run by the author's descendants in a grand English country house (think Chawton but swisher). Meeting her off the ferry is Oliver (Charlie Anson), Austen's handsome, haughty great-great-great-grand nephew, a Darcy indeed (in this first meeting, Anson blatantly channels Hugh Grant, but later eases up on the homage). Agathe, sick with nerves, vomits on his shoes and slags him off on the phone in his earshot, not realising he understands every word. Nevertheless, maybe he's the one? But her amorous friend Félix rolls up unexpectedly too, in a typically British black cab.
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Jane Austen Wrecked My Life indulgently grants Agathe the full Jane Austen experience: not just the stately home and magnificent park but a full dress, candlelit regency ball, corsets and lace in her ultimate seduction. Almost no attempt is made at credibility. Having seen so many British films delusively infatuated with French life, I've often longed for the reverse, and here it is. All the English people spontaneously speak excellent French. There's a marvellous night out in a local pub with ukulele-karaoke and darts. The countryside is spectacular. When Oliver's vintage sports car breaks down, he tells Agathe it is 20 miles to the nearest village.
Actually, Jane Austen a gâché ma vie was filmed entirely in France, mainly at Château d'Hazeville in the Île-de-France, and it looks totally, gorgeously Gallic, down to the wallpaper and the window catches. It's a charming production, with its repeated use of Schubert and its lovely closing cameo, and Rutherford is enchanting. The moral, that Agathe must discover herself as a writer first before finding romantic fulfilment, is impeccable if banal. But what it shows most, perhaps quite inadvertently, is the lengths we must now go to in a bid to recover the very possibility of credible romcom. Swipe left, I'm afraid.
'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is in cinemas on 13 June
[See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now]
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