How can you not marvel at a mother who declares of her daughter’s private school, “The fees are too high to even think of paying! So, in a sense, it’s an economy”? Or who terms America “a nation of ingrates,” adding, “Only having children makes you understand such behavior”? Using the choicest lines from the novella’s letters and adding some of his own, he creates Wildean texture, and Beckinsale’s clear face and brisk cadence let the character’s peculiar genius shine. The dramatis personae - landed English gentry - are presented, one or two at a time, with impish title cards, but the actors play it straight, with scant traces of the camp that disfigured Stillman’s last comedy, Damsels in Distress. He serves up this late-18th-century world with theatrical bravura. Above all, she offers a means of entry into a realm Stillman adores. But she’s attractive, clever, and admirably indefatigable. The woman must be defeated, yes, for the sake of her daughter. Stillman has no evident interest in hating Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale). But it droops with contempt for its protagonist, a narcissistic, impoverished widow with designs on a married lord and an indifference to her teenage daughter. Heretical as it sounds, Stillman has improved on his source, Jane Austen’s pre– Pride and Prejudice epistolary novella commonly known as “Lady Susan.” (It was never titled.) The book reads like a novelist’s first stab at getting into her characters’ heads. The delight of its director, Whit Stillman, enlivens every scene, so what might have seemed stilted is full of human faces in exquisitely subtle states of panic. The elaborately formal period comedy of manners Love & Friendship has a different vibe than other movies of its ilk. Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale in Love & Friendship.
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