Review: Latest Jane Austen rom-com finds the sexy in brushing cheekbones

San Francisco Chronicle​

19-05-2025

'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Persuasion' and 'Pride and Prejudice' gave Agathe impossible romantic standards. 'I'm not living in the right century,' the Parisian bookseller sighs to her coworker and best friend Félix, grousing about dating app swiping and casual hookups.
But in 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,' which opens in Bay Area theaters Thursday, May 22, the Regency-era novelist can't take all the blame for Agathe's 2 a.m. cold pasta binges, the writer's block she's suffering as an aspiring author of her own romantic novels, her two years of celibacy or her refusal to travel following a tragic car accident.
No, all that rests squarely on Agathe's own shoulders — which sets her up perfectly to become the heroine of a romantic comedy.
Since Jane Austen is in the title of Laura Piani's film, and since Agathe (Camille Rutherford) gets hornswoggled into ferrying across the English Channel to attend a Jane Austen writer's retreat on an historic Austen family estate, Austenites can predict certain plot points will come to pass. Agathe will have two suitors. One of them will follow an enemies-to-lovers arc. That enemy will interrupt a solitary tromp through thick forests. Intellectual debate shall whet desire, and there will be a ball with empire-waist dresses where everything hinges on a single, smoldering dance.
The formula persists two centuries after Austen perfected it because it's aspirational and satisfying at the same time: We want it to wreck our own lives, too. It's durable precisely because it's pliable, offering storytellers a template in which to explore their own era's mores and ideals, questions and anxieties. The world is always impatient to pair off young single people, and whether the thing keeping them apart is a patrimonial system entailing an estate away from female heirs or ambiguities around friends-with-benefits, rom-coms a la Austen goad us while soothing us, scratching that itch and making us laugh at ourselves for having it.
In devising a fresh variation on the theme, Piani makes her protagonist nothing less than an employee of Paris' world-famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company who bikes to work with a leather satchel, wearing a plaid-lined parka and updo — all of which would seem to prime her and Félix (Pablo Pauly) to be snooty French people. Then again, Agathe is also kind of a loser. She gets made fun of by her 6-year-old nephew for never having any boyfriends and both perpetrates, and is victimized by, spewed bodily fluids. She complains ad nauseum about writer's block and concocts sexual fantasies about inanimate objects while dining out alone.
The result, with Agathe neither towering wit nor dumpster fire nor book snob, is a refreshingly light touch and a heroine unexaggerated by what Hollywood always thinks we want. As she stumbles into food messes, piles of novels, sexts, spontaneous overshares and Regency waltzes, Rutherford gives her an agreeable air of quiet perturbation and wry self-awareness. She's the kind of person who fixes a cringey divulgence by saying just the right thing or letting a stony expression melt.
In Austen, one suitor always turns out to be really, really the wrong guy. In Piani's take, you root both for Félix, whose play-wrestling with his best friend is followed by the most delicate pause of longing, and for Oliver (Charlie Anson), a scowly lit professor dragooned into helping his parents manage the Austen residency. Agathe could probably choose either and have a decent life, which feels right for our own time when one-and-only, happily-ever-after narratives almost never ring true.
And crucially, whereas in other films lovers need only look at each other to be penetrating by the next shot, Piani knows that withholding is way sexier. Cheekbones get close enough to almost skirt each other, and the whole world seems to thrum. When you dance with someone, you can stare unabashedly into their eyes for long stretches. You can finally try to make out what their intentions are. You can state, with your eyes, your lust, and your partner's eyes can say back, 'I feel it, too, but I'm afraid.'