Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Movie)

A modern heroine learns about love, and a whole lot more, at a writing residency.Besides Shakespeare, no author may haunt the screen more than Jane Austen. Her novels, full of heroines who find love and usually a life lesson or two, practically spawned the romantic comedy. So no wonder filmmakers have tackled copious direct adaptations of Austen’s novels — many of which are modern classics of cinema, like Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” and the six-part TV version of “Pride and Prejudice,” with its indelible scene of Mr. Darcy emerging from a pond in a wet shirt, ensuring generations of crushes on Colin Firth.Yet Austen’s novels are timeless, and thus lend themselves to modernized spins, like “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Metropolitan,” “Clueless,” “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” and dozens more. And there are the meta-Austen tales, stories about loving Austen’s stories: “Austenland,” for instance, and “The Jane Austen Book Club.” The well of, and thirst for, Austenalia is seemingly bottomless.“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is not quite like any of those — more of a cousin from out of town, a little different, a little more intriguing. Written and directed by Laura Piani, it’s a rom-com laced lightly with “Pride and Prejudice” overtones, and it’s also a love letter to writing and reading, and to Austen, too. But there’s plenty going on here that is, if not entirely original, at least not straight from Austen.Our heroine is the 30-something bookworm Agathe (a charming Camille Rutherford), who is French and lives in Paris, where she works at the storied English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company, having learned English from her father during her childhood. (Early scenes are shot in the real bookshop, which is a fun nugget for fans of the store.) The setup has the ring of familiarity: Her best friend Felix (Pablo Pauly, suitably impish) also works at the store, and the two are chummy and inseparable. You can feel a romance coming on, but the movie isn’t going to make it quite so easy for us or for them.Agathe also dreams of being a writer, but something psychological is holding her back, and she’s at a bit of a standstill. The movie takes its time unpeeling those layers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More