With Laura Piani, no boundaries between cinema and literature [Interview]

A film as endearing as its main character, himself a mosaic of everyone’s sensibilities and singularities. In “Jane Austen ruined my life”, French director Laura Piani portrays Agathe, a bookseller who is fascinating in her contradictions. A former bookseller herself, the filmmaker presented her cinematic opus as part of the official competition of the 21st edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM 2024).

In this first feature film, Laura Piani offers a romantic comedy and references Jane Austen, a figure of 18th century English literature, while affectionately portraying a young woman who dreams of a romantic love story. Agathe has a deep frustration: among the books, one of her rare means of escaping the emotional isolation inside her bookstore, she is overtaken by a real life which does not live up to what literature promises him as authentic loves and abundant imagination.

Embroiled in literature and out of step with her environment, Agathe responds to an invitation to take part in a writing residency in Great Britain. Then begin affronts and inner questions, symbolized by a journey that promises personal developments and changes, questioning idealized and realistic perceptions of love and attachment.

Camille Rutherford as Agatha in “Jane Austen Has Ruined My Life”

Literary references are very present in your life. Is that why you wanted to talk about literature by making your first film?

Yes, that’s absolutely why this first film was written. However, I hesitated for a long time to move into directing, thinking that I would continue to be a bookseller at Shakespeare & Co, in Paris. I was very fulfilled, professionally: I recommended books, I read them all day, it was wonderful… Furthermore, I was a screenwriter and I wrote for others. I was exactly where I wanted to be, between books and words.

Then, the desire to produce came from this very experience as a bookseller, from the tenderness with which I looked at the people who worked with me, sometimes actors or musicians, booksellers also like me, to earn their living in Paris. I saw how out of step we were all, with this feeling of not being in the right era, like the main character of the film in the end.

I was surrounded by people who came far away, who had left everything to come to Paris, who were also very alone. They did not recognize themselves in this ultra-connected, excessively consumerist world. That’s what made me want to make the film, in addition to having experienced a bereavement, after which I asked myself the question of how to talk about it with a comedy, question the legacy, live with the absence of someone, to make do with what was left to us, without being crushed. These are deep reflections that I wanted to address in a light, comical way, through the portrait of this woman bookseller.

Since you worked in a bookstore where you read a lot, how did Jane Austen inspire you in real life?

Jane Austen especially inspired me through her work (Pride and Prejudice, editor’s note). I remember being a reader in several stages. I first discovered love stories, with the seriousness one has at the age of 15. Then, I reread it at 20 and that’s when I grasped the humor, the irony, the irreverent way in which she portrays an era and a society. This allowed me to understand the major political and feminist questions that run through his writings.

Even today, the question of women’s freedom arises. How to preserve your freedom, keep a space for self-realization when you are a woman and you become someone’s wife, someone’s mother, when you are still someone’s daughter and we take care of everyone. For me, Jane Austen is so well known because these issues are resolutely timeless.

The characters in your film are endearing, in their resistance to creeping Uberization. Your feature film is part of an assumed genre film register and is generally understood as a refusal of this uberized life. Is this what the seventh art should be used for, in your opinion?

Yes. I believe that cinema above all opens up the field of possibilities, possibilities of living lives other than ours. That’s the beauty of genre films, in my opinion. The romantic comedy allows us to paint the portrait of an era, to say things, sometimes profound, sometimes harsh, while being entertaining but while being obliged to respect the expectations of the informed spectator, who knows the genre perfectly.

Camille Rutherford as Agatha in “Jane Austen Has Ruined My Life”

So I wanted to make a film with a slow pace and work on it at the same time, to respect the balance that makes it stay within its genre. This story had to last 1h37, with the imperative for me as director to work on the sequences in detail, so as to give a feeling of slowness, while remaining within the overall offbeat rhythm. It was a real challenge for me, with testing experiences.

Indeed, this film bears the mark of cinema which takes the time to do everything and pays attention to the grain. Was it a long preparation process?

Absolutely, you always have to take the time! We find this idea in the dialogues and situations of the film, notably in the tenderness with which the character says that it is a pleasure to be in this house to take care of people, because we must not underestimate the small gestures of love. I think that’s the heart of the film: the affection and the questioning of no longer seeing things at a proper pace, when we go too fast.

The film also tells the story of someone who takes his time. It’s an ode to long time, to slowness, to the fact that trauma, suffering, takes time to heal so that we can finally find ourselves. It is in a way the psychoanalytic story of someone who returns to his ruins, to his wounds in order to find breath and get started. In a society where we are in an injunction to happiness, where we have weeks of retirement so that in one week we have everything sorted out, I think it is important to tell ourselves that we have plenty of time to we have to take enough.

Given the influences that have marked your path in thought, did you try your hand at literary writing before taking the plunge into cinema?

I come from a family in which people write literature. I immediately went off on a tangent by writing screenplays. It was my free space. Furthermore, my grandmother, an Algerian poet, showed me the films noirs of Lou Beach and Billy Wilder when I was 8 years old. She gave me a taste for cinema. I have movie-loving parents too. So very quickly in college, I started skipping school to go to the cinema in Paris. I left the house in the morning with my backpack, but I spent my whole day at the cinema!

For now, writing for images suits me well. I enjoy writing so that a story is interpreted by actors. The book project is not there yet.

Many directors and writers have explored the unbreakable links between cinema and literature. Do you subscribe to this reflection?

Yes, I believe in the transversal link between cinema and literature, in the way in which a story unfolds, in the constraints and successes for a film to give the sensation of reading a novel.

When I say novel, it’s time spent living with a character. For me, it’s the feeling of literature in cinema. The last film that gave me this impression was “The Invisible Life of Euridice Guizmão” by Karim Aïnouz.

In almost two hours in a movie theater, I felt like I was reading a book and spending real-life time with the protagonist. It’s an extraordinary melodrama. So I believe in the question of the story written on screen, in the deployment of character trajectories, in what we can do with inner voices in literature and cinema. I find questions of adaptation fascinating.