Lady Susan lacks money and a home of her own, and lives as a guest of friends and relations. Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) is a young widow who has become the scandal of her set, accused of having an affair with Lord Manwaring, a nobleman who has separated from his wife.
“Love & Friendship” is, for Stillman, a story of a woman’s secret self-liberation in a society in which the burden of restrictions on women’s behavior is onerous. He depicts style as a mask and mode of deception, and this deceit-and the willful ends that it achieves-doesn’t undercut the beauty of style but, rather, heightens it. Stillman sees style as a way of coping gracefully with society’s rules and fulfilling illicit desires without violence or even disruption. For Stillman, style is a matter of submitting gracefully to the imperatives of society in order to achieve one’s personal goals and fulfill one’s own will nonetheless-a superficial submission that masks will with beauty, a mode of irony that’s not merely logical (Socratic style) but aesthetic. With the strict and mighty edifice of social order rendered visible, Stillman, in “Love & Friendship,” brings his career-long big idea to a new pitch of specificity and clarity. Just as Ford’s West was like Socrates’ city in speech, where the functions of government were still being defined and were being deployed locally, physically, dramatically-where the abstractions of modern bureaucracy were rendered tangible-Stillman’s Austenland is where the codes of society are well known and stringently enforced, where the hidden framework of punctilious rules and rigid norms is brought to the forefront and architecturally externalized, like a Beaubourg of mores. Stillman is not English and not two hundred years old, but his home turf is the realm of style, and the formalities and conventions of pre-industrial and aristocratic England-as they can be gleaned from books, images, and studies-are the movie’s very substance.įor Stillman, Austen’s England is like John Ford’s West-a place that Stillman had no personal experience of but that, in his idealizing cinematic reconstitution, embodies his crucial ideas. “Love & Friendship,” an adaptation of an early novel by Jane Austen that was published only posthumously (in 1871), is set in London and on rural English estates in the early nineteenth century. One of the reasons why Whit Stillman’s new film, “Love & Friendship,” is so deeply satisfying is that he filmed it on his home turf.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD WALSH / AMAZON STUDIOS / ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS In “Love & Friendship,” a Jane Austen adaptation directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale, the story of a woman’s self-liberation in a changing society becomes strangely, deeply personal.
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