“What a mistake you made marrying him,” Susan chides. Johnson (Stephen Fry), a man who is just one more scandal away from shipping Alicia off back to Pennyslvania. It is all so tangled and sordid that Susan and audiences can be thankful there is at least one actual eponymous relation of affection in the whole affair-Lady Susan’s long-term conspiratorial sisterhood with Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), an American every bit as crafty as her best friend, if only she hadn’t married Mr. However, there is also Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), another suitor so dim that he is unaware that in his awkward courting of Lady Susan, he is being pawned off on Susan’s daughter-or that during their own long friendship that the Lady Susan is spending an awful lot of time with the married Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O’Mearáin) while his actual wife is nowhere to be seen.
Bennets of the world, the widowed Susan Vernon has finding a husband for Frederica on her mind-just near the back and right next to other trivial concerns like why it is only respectful for her not to pay her “friend” and unofficial maid, Mrs. Just as so many women who are no longer ingénues in these stories, Beckinsale’s Lady Susan Vernon has a daughter of marrying age named Frederica (Morfydd Clark). But unlike so many projects in a form that can frequently be as stifling as a corset, Love & Friendship features the lightest of touches from both the writer-director and its performers, allowing for a film that cuts quite an impressive figure while being auspiciously naughty.īased on Lady Susan, one of Austen’s earliest novellas that was not published in her lifetime (and which I have admittedly never read), this film adaptation seems like a perfect inversion of so many of the author’s now iconic tropes. As Lady Susan, Beckinsale revisits the typically gilded ornamentation of her earliest genre films before the trip to Hollywood (such as Much Ado About Nothing and Cold Comfort Farm).
Indeed, by reteaming with his The Last Days of Disco leading lady a number of years later, Stillman and Beckinsale’s collaboration has gifted the actress with what might be a career best performance it’s definitely an endlessly entertaining one. Playing as if all the characters have seen their fair share of Sense & Sensibility films too, Whit Stillman’s devilishly self-aware costume drama is as dangerously beguiling as star Kate Beckinsale’s scandalous Lady Susan, a woman who can be called many things, but never proper. Perhaps this is why Love & Friendship is so delightfully wicked. They can be prideful and they can be prejudiced, but they must above all else be able to do it with the proper amount of propriety. There is a certain etiquette and level of decorum that comes with Jane Austen adaptations.