Yesterday, I went to the Angelika Film Center and saw Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a 2024 French romantic comedy written and directed by Laura Piani. The film stars Camille Rutherford as Agathe, a young Parisian woman who works at Shakespeare & Company with her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly). She lives with her sister and her six-year-old nephew, and is struggling with trauma since her parents were killed in an automobile accident in which she was injured. She takes her bicycle everywhere and is afraid to get in cars. She is told by her writing teacher not to write "cheap romances" anymore and to get out of her comfort zone, but when she's drinking sake in a Chinese restaurant, she imagines a man's face at the bottom of her cup and fantasizes about him, inspiring her to write romances. She has confused, unrequited feelings for Félix, who is a casual player in dating, and she hasn't had sex in two years. She isn't into the dating app culture or swiping, and is lonely and pines for more of a romantic connection.
Her sister tells her she needs to break out of her funk and get out of her head. Then, she gets an invite in the mail to the Jane Austen Residency in England, a two-week writing retreat. Félix, knowing that she adores Austen and identifies with Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion (for being an old maid), secretly sent her work to them and got her accepted. She reluctantly goes, taking the Channel ferry across from Paris to London, and she kisses Félix and departs.
At the ferry's terminal in England, she is picked up by Oliver (Charlie Anson), a distant descendant of Jane Austen, who is not a fan of her work, and takes her to the retreat in a mansion, hosted by his elderly parents. There, she meets the other writers, and struggles with writer's block, and over the course of the time, struggles with her romantic feelings towards Félix and later Oliver, who starts off seeming arrogant but opens up more to Agathe about his personal struggles.
I really enjoyed this film. I liked how it was mostly about a woman struggling with her creative process as a writer, dealing with trauma from her past, and learning how to get out of her writer's block to be an artist and let go. I wasn't as into the love triangle parts, finding it predictable as who she would end up with, but it's a romantic comedy, so I knew that would be a part of it going in.
Rutherford is really lovely and charming as a lead, with romantic dark brown curls, and is French-British in real life and fluent in French and English, as is her character, and the film is written so that the majority of characters are bilingual in both languages, easily switching between both languages whenever they want. I really enjoyed her connection with Oliver's mom Beth (Liz Crowther), an old English woman speaking to her in French and being very hospitable and sweet, and encouraging her in her talents and passion as a writer. I also liked when she developed friendships with two other women (Annabelle Lengronne; Lola Peprow) at the residency, of them being supportive of each other and going out to a bar to sing and get drunk and have fun. In the film opening, there's a fun scene of Agathe in the bookstore singing along to the song "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke, and it's really adorable and cute.
I thought this was a really nice movie, a sweet bilingual romantic comedy, and I'm happy I checked it out.
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