Many film fans are starved for romantic stories right now, so when a sophisticated romantic comedy comes along, it’s a welcome balm in tough times. French writer Laura Piani had been churning out dark cop procedurals when she realized she wanted to spend her time writing comedies.
What became the charming “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” took some years to grow into its final form, and even Piani didn’t know she was going to direct it at the start. The film has already opened in France, where it performed well for a small-budget movie starring theater actors. Sony Pictures Classics picked it up for domestic release at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and is rolling it out against blockbuster counter-programming like “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.” Audiences should delight in it.
The mystery of Jane Austen’s enduring power is at the heart of this comedy, which engages a young bookstore worker and struggling author, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), in a classic romantic triangle. “I’m so happy to see, as we’re touring with the film, how many people actually love Jane Austen,” Piani said in a Zoom interview. “It’s insane. From Spain to Greece, from everywhere in the world, they come to see the movie, and they talk about how much they love Jane Austen. So it’s a big gift as a filmmaker to meet this audience.”
Piani’s favorite Austen movie? Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility,” written by and starring Emma Thompson. Austen stays influential because she was “mocking the conventions of her time,” Piani said. “So that’s how also she became timeless. What is revolutionary for me as a reader is that I discovered when I first read her that none of the lead characters are described physically. They’re not heroes because of their physical qualities. They’re heroes because they’re smart, they’re clever, they’re funny, they have good heart.”
She added, “This had never been written like this before Jane Austen, it was written by men: women were beautiful or miserable or evil. She created something that is extremely modern and resonates. And the romantic ideal that she creates around Mr. Darcy: he is the opposite of the alpha male that used to be the hero. He doesn’t talk in public. He is a bit clumsy. He’s shy. She was extremely ahead of her time.”
Piani didn’t start with Jane Austen, that came later. “I started with the bookshop [Paris’ famous Shakespeare & Company], where I was working, all the people that I met who were a bit like me at this time, who shared with me this feeling of inadequacy, that we were not born in the right century. It was going too fast. It was too cynical. I wanted to portray that,” Piani said.
Piani created a woman who dreams of writing her own stories and works in a bookshop, she said, “but is not capable of writing and is not capable of having any love stories. Who could be the writer that could actually ruin her life? And there is Jane Austen. She doesn’t ruin any life, but she set up a standard in love that is quite high and difficult to reach.”
The filmmaker continued, “I wanted to explore my relationship to her books, as much as her life, by going to Chawton in England to do some research in the place where Jane Austen lived her last years with her sister and her mother. I visited this little cottage where she used to live until she died, and I remember crying when I visited her room, because you have the desk that is still there, they didn’t touch anything. There was this bed that she was sharing with her sister Cassandra. I didn’t know that. To imagine these two women who didn’t get married by choice. She fell in love, couldn’t marry the guy, and then she also knew that if she was getting married, she would spend her life taking care of others, and she would stop writing. I was as much inspired from her life choices and her correspondence as with her books.”
Piani spent ten years writing political, social dramas, dark stories, thrillers, or cop stories. She met a producer in Italy in a festival, and I told her, “My heart belongs to comedy. I started to become a cinephile because I went to see Billy Wilder and Lubitsch movies at the Cinematheque in Paris. I want to do rom-com.”
After a year, she delivered a draft that was so intimate and personal, that she “couldn’t dream of anyone directing it,” she said. “I did this film for a simple reason, because I was missing this kind of film as a viewer, and I wanted to offer it to my friends that I love who are stuck into this never-ending loop of watching the same ’90s rom-coms that we all love from the Richard Curtis golden era. It’s a genre that is so rich and so deep. When you start thinking about how people love each other, desire each other, it’s political. It’s a mirror to the time we’re living in. I don’t want to do another thing about a woman who is saved by a man. I wanted her to become a writer. Once she reached this goal, she can see around her and recognize love.”
The love triangle is a dramaturgical structure that goes on forever. “I wanted to use this ideal Mr. Darcy figure, the mysterious, difficult to read stereotype,” said Piani. “But I wanted also to explore a character who is a seducer, but who is not toxic, who is not Don Juan, who is more like a Casanova. He just loves them all, and he cannot leave anyone. It’s the portrait of a woman who will unblock and face her desire. I wanted to explore what happens when there is this friendship and these doubts that we can all have at some point in our life when we get along so well with someone so it might be comfortable because it’s familiar and it’s easy and it’s reassuring to think that it could be love, while actually love is also lots of risk and unknowns.”
Piani also recognizes that Austen’s world is not our world. “The biggest difference is that in Jane Austen’s books, women had to get married to survive,” said Piani. “A wedding was the main goal, but they had to find a way to survive and to not be trapped in a terrible wedding with a horrible man. It makes no sense to use that anymore. I wanted to make a comedy about writing and the absurdity and the difficulty of what it means to write when everything in life pushes you to not do that and to do something else, because it’s the hardest thing in the world.”
Making comedy was part of the deal. Piani is not above grabbing a laugh when a naked woman opens the wrong door. “I love characters when they are shameful,” she said, “when they make mistakes, and the weirder they are, the more that I love them. Shame is central for comedy. That’s what you want to see — what we’re trying to hide all the time. A woman can film another woman’s body and find pure comedy, not at all anything that could be either sexy or erotic.”
Piani is relieved that audiences responded to her movie. “You know that you’re not alone,” she said, “and that they will be people everywhere who have this need for lightness and depth and comedy and melancholy and Jane Austen. I didn’t know that we would survive the experience, but I knew that I wanted to do it for them.”
Next up: She’s writing another love story set in France and Italy.
Sony Pictures Classics will release “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” in select theaters on Friday, May 23, with a wide release to follow on Friday, May 30.
