Jane Austen Wrecked My Life Review

Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works at the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris with her best friend Felix (Pablo Pauly). Though that would seem like a dream existence for many people, Agathe is not happy – like her favourite Jane Austen heroine, Anne Elliott, she feels she “has let life pass her by”.

So when, without her knowing it, Felix sends her incomplete novel manuscript to the Jane Austen Writing Residency in England, and they accept her, she (reluctantly, eventually) agrees to go. There she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great, great, great, great nephew of Austen, with a Mr Darcy-like demeanour. Has she found the man to reignite her spark?

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life – written and directed by Laura Piani – is capital-I Inoffensive. Set in the pastoral countryside, with a supporting cast happy to deliver platitudinous speeches at a moment’s notice, and comedy ‘llamas’ (they’re clearly alpacas) roving around to cause…not mayhem exactly, but mild amusement, it’s the sort of production that runs far from anything that couldn’t be described as ‘pleasant’.

In fact, there are traumas floating around in the character’s backstories, but they’re treated as if they have the same weight as the autumn leaves gently falling outside the writers’ residence. Agathe’s parents both died in a car crash six years earlier – she was in the back seat. Quite understandably, she’s been reluctant to get into cars ever since. Yet, she does. And it’s fine. That’s the extent of that. Then there’s Oliver’s uncle’s incipient dementia, which is actually treated more as a punchline then as something that carries any real emotional substance.

Not every film has to have emotional substance, but they have to have something – this one certainly isn’t funny enough to make up for the emptiness at its centre. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is so vague, so lacking in specificity, it refuses to be pinned down. Agathe is apparently an incredibly talented writer, who delivered the best opening chapters that Oliver has read in years. All we really learn about her writing, is that she pens romance novels. We just have to take the movie’s word for it that she’s a genius. Or in fact, an interesting protagonist.

The love triangle is more frustrating still. By far the most engaging character here is Felix, who is expressive and warm, and offers Agathe a loving, safe harbour. When the friends kiss for the first time before she leaves for the UK, it sets a love triangle in motion. The third point of this triangle, however, Charlie Anson’s Oliver, only has one facial expression. It’s clear that was the main takeaway in this film’s attempt to conjure up a stoic Darcy figure, and it was not the correct one. As with everything else here, we just have to accept Oliver and Agathe are meant to have this instant, combustible chemistry.

The one unqualifiedly good thing about Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a cameo from great American documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who after appearing as a gynaecologist in Other People’s Children, and a radio announcer in Eephus, turns up at the end of Piani’s film to read a poem (Path, by Jack Hirschman). Those two minutes, at least, are lovely.

★★

Icon Film Distribution presents Jane Austen Wrecked My Life on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from 28th July