No Austen Found in “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”
To take on the entire lineage of the Jane Austen franchise is a formidable task, especially on the celebrated writer’s 250th birthday. Not to say that a new Austen movie cannot escape the shadow of its predecessors, but it is certainly quite difficult to insert oneself into the Hall of Fame that includes the 1995 Pride and Prejudice and the 2007 Northanger Abbey. However, Laura Piani, in her 2024 film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, has carved out a French corner in the English franchise, offering a bilingual gift to Austen fans with a surprising retelling of Pride and Prejudice that, at the very least, rectifies the atrocities of the 2022 film adaptation of Persuasion.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is not strictly an Austen adaptation; it is a rom-com set in the 21st century that tells the story of Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), a resident writer at Shakespeare and Co. whose love life is not plagued by her knowledge of Austen novels, as the title temptingly suggest, but by a general passivity in life. She has worked with her friend, more so love-interest, Felix (Pablo Pauly), for 10 years, and is always trying to write something worth its salt. After writing an excellent first chapter inspired by a naked woman at the bottom of her sake cup, Agathe was invited by the Jane Austen Residency to spend two weeks at a writer’s retreat. Here, she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), the last corner of the love triangle, a French-speaking-Hugh-Grant-lookalike-Englishman who is also a professor of contemporary literature at King’s College London.
The intrigue of the movie lies in this bookish fantasy, where the protagonist makes a living writing and working at a famed bookstore in Paris, and where access to high culture is so cliché but fitting. Piani, having worked at Shakespeare and Company herself, writes an accessible premise to Agathe’s rise to stardom, giving the film its claim to reality. Unlike most rom-coms’ writer-protagonists—who seem to either fall miraculously in love with a publisher or be entitled to a prestigious book prize, Piani’s writer is equipped with a sensibility that is self-loathing and destructive. Agathe is acutely aware of why she writes, and she suffers for her writing. Her self-consciousness is not the mere insecurity of a quirky rom-com protagonist, but a palpable awareness of her intelligence and her pitfalls, so much so that her love life suffers. Within Agathe’s brand of insecurity is a fear of greatness in love and in life, which in turn makes her story as a writer much more graceful and erudite.
Yet, Piani doesn’t represent literariness well on screen. The most powerful scene of the movie is arguably when Agathe imagines having an affair with a Chinese man (which served as the inspiration for her chapter). Agathe is swept up in dance and music that transports us, giving the film a dreamlike and fantastical edge, where reality falls and literary imaginations slip through. Yet the scene is as ephemeral as the dream; for the rest of the movie, the scenes seemed kidnapped by some production necessity where romance takes rein and literariness subsides. The promising start gave way to a trope narrative, which includes a scene where a Marxist feminist writer criticizes Agathe’s writing for not being political enough, a scene that serves no other function than for Oliver to pick up on Agathe’s sensibilities. The caricature of this radical author seems almost trite and contrived for Agathe’s crafted character. There might be a latent Marxist critique that can be made for Austen, but the critique doesn’t go very far—it was more performance than commentary.
Nonetheless, for Austen fans, the movie's references to the classic novels would remain an exciting experience. The film spends well, albeit scantily, its inheritance of the Austen tradition, just enough for fans to recognize it: in reuniting with Agathe after she had run away from the residency due to a writer’s block, Oliver leaves an anonymous note at Shakespeare & Co. with a quote from Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy confesses how “ardently” he loves Elizabeth. Piani does throw us a red herring at the beginning of the film—Agathe characterizes herself as Anne Elliot in Persuasion, subordinate in beauty but not in intelligence—but that characterization was never realized (perhaps with only a sign of Sir Walter Elliot). The film owes much more to rom-com than to Austen, with the latter being much more of an excuse for a film that makes for an interesting premise. Alas, it was what the audience was promised.
It is tempting to see rom-coms for more than what they are, especially when they are French and about Jane Austen. When expectations are marketed, the subplot falls, and whatever claim to literariness disappears into the comedic veneer of lighthearted bilingual jokes and swear words. Much like Agathe, the movie is mired in nostalgia for the British pastorale, unable to reckon with the force of modernity. This duality underlines Agathe’s every thought and makes the romance inconceivable.
In seeing Agathe, one is immediately reminded of “Fleabag” for the same makeup, hairstyle, and self-destructive love life. Yet, Fleabag does much more than fan service. Fleabag is destructive, inwardly and outwardly so. Under Piani’s great story of a writer lies her terrible ambition, stymied by genre films and missing something else. Something—like in Fleabag—more mischievous, more modern, more feminist.