Reason and feelings
Just like the character of Agathe, a dreamy young woman in search of literary inspiration, Laura Piani worked at the famous Parisian bookstore Shakespeare & Co while she studied screenwriting. It is in this timeless setting that his fictional saleswoman recommends Jane Austen’s novels to customers, in a surge of romanticism that she herself would like to experience.
After this concrete rapprochement between the author and her heroine, the film is very dependent on the immediate identification that is woven with the charming protagonist. Camille Rutherford (seen notably in The Night of the 12th et Anatomy of a fall) perfectly embodies the sweet awkwardness of Agathe, whom the camera follows in her wanderings. Her sad eyes and somewhat awkward posture never seem at ease in the space around her, and it is this disconnection that interests the filmmaker.
Reluctant to give in “uberized sex” as she describes it herself, it is not in phase with this more immediate and liberated era on a sentimental level. It must be said that Agathe generally finds it difficult to commit to anything, to take the plunge, to indulge in a spontaneity that would give her inspiration. She initially needs a helping hand from her sister and her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly) to dare to join the Jane Austen residence in England, and continue a manuscript that she is struggling to move forward with.
Laura Piani does not intend to play the originality card, and even if the overall structure of her story may suffer from its obligatory passages, it is clear that its simplicity does a lot of good. Because behind Agathe’s forced change of scenery, already a source of challenges and introspection, the meeting with Oliver (Charlie Anson), a descendant of Jane Austen whose irony recalls Hugh Grant, constitutes the other major element of tension in the story.
-The Age of Reason
Jane Austen ruined my life assumes the old-fashioned charm of its inspirations, those in which the main character curls up. The opportunity to revive the literary impact of the novelist (notably in her humor) on decades of British romantic comedies. We think of Bridget Jones or even to Four weddings and a funeralbut with this typically French intellectualization, where the characters self-psychoanalyze without knowing how to act on their problems.
The staging could be more openly poetic and more in tune with the storm under the head of its protagonist (especially given the settings at her disposal), but it is in this whirlwind of doubts and contradictions that the film fascinates the most.
Between her imposter syndrome, her blissful romanticism and her questions about the image she must project as a 21st century woman, Agathe reflects the weight of such a contemporary mental burden, of a chaos that she must accept and embrace. The budding writer must learn to nourish herself with this complex, mosaic-like identity to be able to put on the page what truly resembles her.
This tone, resolutely feminist, committed, but always questioning, brings out the main quality of Jane Austen ruined my life : the very “cozy” feeling that emergesfullness in the face of a director who listens to her characters and their emotions. Nothing revolutionary in itself, but a little cinematic pleasure that cannot be refused.
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