Love & Friendship

[projekktor id=’24183′]

Based on Jane Austen’s short novel Lady Susan, Love & Friendship is a late eighteenth century romantic comedy directed by Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona). The film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and stars Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenwell, Morfydd Clark, Jemma Redgrave, Tom Bennett, James Fleet, Stephen Fry, and Chloë Sevigny.

Beautiful young widow Lady Susan Vernon visits to the estate of her in-laws to wait out the colourful rumours about her dalliances circulating through polite society. Whilst ensconced there, she decides to secure a husband for herself and a future for her eligible but reluctant daughter, Frederica. In doing so she attracts the simultaneous attentions of the young, handsome Reginald DeCourcy, the rich and silly Sir James Martin and the divinely handsome, but married, Lord Manwaring, complicating matters severely.

“A new Jane Austen is quite a find, I think,” says Beckinsale. “It’s quite exciting to find something that people are not necessarily familiar with, either the trajectory of the story, or the characters. The thing about the Lady Susan Vernon character is that, unusually for romantic literature, at the core she’s not a very good person. And yet, she’s celebrated in the novella. It is extraordinarily well written and well observed and well drawn. This is an epistolary novel and it has its own difficulties in adapting. Lady Susan doesn’t have the same kind of reflection as Emma has, or self-analysis.”