Her base of operations is the Churchill estate owned by her brother-in-law Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards) whose wife Catherine (Emma Greenwell) is onto Susan’s wiles. Though the deliciously barbed dialogue stays firmly in period, the emotions bubbling up under the film’s cultivated surface have a this-just-in tartness.Ī sublime Kate Beckinsale digs into the role of her career as Lady Susan Vernon, a widow with impeccable taste and the scheming ambitions of a Kardashian. Happily, Austen and Stillman prove to be soulmates. It wasn’t until 2011 that Stillman gave us Damsels in Distress, another comedy of bad manners among today’s young and restless. He’s a lone wolf, known for writing and directing his own elegantly witty films with large gaps in between: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998). Stillman doesn’t adapt the works of others, even a genius like Austen.

I can’t think of a more wickedly modern romantic comedy, even though the film is based on Lady Susan, an unfinished epistolary novella that Jane Austen wrote in 1794 when she was about 20, and that remained unpublished until after her death. Love & Friendship passes with flying colors. And like anything you love at first sight, you want to see it again - not just to get closer but to put it to the test.

The first time I saw Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship I fell head over heels.

Film love and friendship review