“Jane Austen ruined my life”, reason and good feelings – Libération

For her first feature film, Laura Piani, a trained screenwriter, chooses to follow a path that we actually thought had dried up since the end of the 20th century: the romantic comedy squared, that is to say the English romantic comedy, with a gently lost heroine, haunted by literature, nestled in her solid wood bookstore (the legendary Shakespeare and Company shop) and meeting Prince Charming during a short stay in a mansion from across the Channel, following a few misunderstandings and fanciful adventures. A recipe hardly brought up to date, banking everything on an old-fashioned charm which, if it is not fundamentally unsympathetic, raises questions as a choice for a first film. Here, Agathe's gentle adventures are carried by actress Camille Rutherford, perfect in her lanky presence of an eternal post-teen, stuck between a dreamy attitude and clumsy desires, injecting just the right amount of anachronism so that we believe her when she says she was born in the wrong century. The subtly sculpted image of cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer (already noted for his work on the clay man) is also to the credit of the film, in that it provides material to contemplate while Jane Austen's program… unfolds without a hitch before our eyes. Too bad the film never chooses