By Christine Westwood
Love And Friendship is a sophisticated, edgy comedy based on Jane Austen’s novella, Lady Susan, which remained unpublished in her lifetime. Speaking from the red carpet ahead of the film’s world premiere at The Sundance Film Festival, director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, The Last Days Of Disco), who also wrote the screenplay, gave FilmInk his thoughts about Jane Austen’s opinion of her scandalous heroine. “I think that she was originally very amused by Lady Susan, and was thrilled by her as a humorous anti-heroine, but I think that over time she became a little bit sceptical of her, and that’s why she didn’t put it forward for publication,” the director offers.
The novella is basically a series of letters in which the unscrupulous Lady Susan schemes and manipulates her way through Regency society. Witty, elegant, and cleverly subverting the normal rules of romantic fiction, the novella grabbed Stillman’s attention from the outset. “It’s frank, direct, and funny,” he explains. “I love Austen and Oscar Wilde, and in this book, Austen was writing in the Oscar Wilde mode. It was freeing, and very fresh. It’s very funny and exciting, but at first, I didn’t know if it would work as a film story. There were quite a few problems with it, because Austen wrote it in an apostolic style, a sort of Dangerous Liaisons kind of thing, so it took a long time to adapt it. The letters had to become dramatic scenes between characters. I was working to slowly move it from one form into another, and it was almost nine years before I felt it was ready to show it around.”
The film stars Kate Beckinsale (who had previously starred for Stillman in The Last Days Of Disco) in the lead role of Lady Susan. When asked at the Sundance after-screening Q&A how she related to the character, Beckinsale said, tongue in cheek, “I’m known among my girlfriends for wit and candour, so that was easy for me to relate to. Oh, and for being a clever, scheming bitch!” Stillman adds: “I owe a lot to Kate. As soon as I started to feed her scripts, she was sending emails with ideas and questions. It was very useful having someone ask, ‘Why are we doing this? What is this scene about?’ She was just going through everything.”
The title sequence of the film features the written script of the period and harpsichord music to firmly set the tone of the Georgian period and the sense of the written word, with its exacting, clever language, and also its layers and deception. The characters are introduced with a witty flourish. They include Australian actor, Xavier Samuel, as Reginald, the good but gullible heir to a fortune. Samuel prepared for the role by working hard on the upper class period accent. “I got in touch with John Washington,” Samuel says at Sundance. “He’s a terrific dialect coach. We worked through the accent, and there were all sorts of strange inconsistencies in the way that they spoke, and that helps to inform the character.”
Reginald is the innocent, along with Lady Susan’s ill-treated daughter, Frederica, played by Irish actress, Morfydd Clark. Reginald is the dupe to Lady Susan, but he’s also honourable and likeable, so you hope that he breaks free of her machinations. Samuel plays it nicely, bringing a believable sense of the young heir, with his nobility and loyalty. In the end, the innocents fare better than in Dangerous Liaisons, but so do the villains. Lady Susan herself is a character that doesn’t grow. She has no morals at all, a fact which gives her tremendous power. The cast also includes British acting stalwarts, Stephen Fry, James Fleet, and Jemma Redgrave, but it is busy TV actor, Tom Bennett, who steals the show with his hilarious portrayal as the verbose and credulous suitor, Sir James Martin. Stillman was quick to make the most of Bennett’s comic gifts. “The actor brought so much to it,” he says. “We had a table reading, and suddenly Sir James Martin was there on Skype. Tom created this wonderful character based on a few scenes that were in the novel. He was just so exciting that I wrote more scenes for him.”
The location for the main set of the stately home where Lady Susan stays to plot her schemes of remarrying was in Ireland, where intact Georgian architecture can still be found. The set designs and the costumes are lavish, and underline the plot’s subtle air of sensuality and decadence. “There were extraordinary costumes, several for each of us,” says Beckinsale. “They really expressed the character of each person. They didn’t want to go for the Empire waist though; they went for something different than what we’re used to seeing in Jane Austen. They went for a slightly saucier French look from the fashion of the period.”
The only character who isn’t a victim to Lady Susan’s fortune-hunting schemes is her confidante, Alicia Johnson, an American emigre unhappily married to an English aristocrat. Chloe Sevigny (also an alumnus from Stillman’s The Last Days Of Disco) is a perfect foil to Beckinsale, adding both depth and relish in their scenes together. The friends are as shameless and self-serving as any Facebook celebrities, as we watch Sevigny’s character feed off Lady Susan’s ruthless narcissism and sense of entitlement. Stillman built up Sevigny’s part, and used the fact of her being an outsider to clearly define the frank commentary that underpins and contrasts with Lady Susan’s devious play acting with the other characters. “With Chloe’s character being from Connecticut – in the novel, there’s not that much about her background – it was really helpful having someone who lived in London and was from America to play the character.”
Sevigny’s character also fills out some interesting social context. We see her entrapment and frustration as she lives with the realisation that marrying for money – the main goal for women in Austen’s day – has obvious advantages, but can also become a prison with a huge emotional cost. “It was great to come back and work with Whit,” says Sevigny. “The band was back together! It’s nice to work with people that you’ve worked with in the past. There’s a great history with filmmakers working with actors that they’ve worked with before. It was nice to have the familiarity.”
At Sundance, festival director, John Cooper, announced Love And Friendship’s world premiere screening by saying, “Jane Austen isn’t what you usually think about when you think of Sundance, but when Whit Stillman does it…well, it’s exactly Sundance.” At the Q&A, Stillman adds, “I’ve been accused of living in Georgian times all the time. Jane Austen has been an inspiration for a lot of people, and it was a beautiful, funny novella. It was also incomplete, so things had to be added. Those who love Jane Austen may want another book in the library, and this is a chance of having something extra, even though it’s in the form of a film.”
Love And Friendship is released in cinemas on July 21.
