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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Trapped between two wars: The art of the Lost Generation
Sometime in the early 1920s, Gertrude Stein took her ancient Ford Model T from her home in Paris's Rue de Fleurus to a local mechanic. The car had been having starting trouble, and the young mechanic assigned to it was making heavy weather of it. Eventually, Stein deemed his efforts unsatisfactory and complained to his boss, who berated the boy, saying: 'You are all a generation perdue.' When Ernest Hemingway, a friend, next visited her home, she applied it to him and others of his generation. 'All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation,' she said. Hemingway, who understood the value of phrases like that, used it as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which follows the lives of a group of American and British expatriates in Paris in the mid-1920s, rootless people wounded physically and emotionally by the Great War, looking for, and not always finding, an anchor. The expatriates in Paris at the time, incidentally, made up a sort of who's who of the cultural icons of the first half of the 20th century. The poet Ezra Pound moved to Paris in 1921. Writer Ford Madox Ford in 1922. Novelist John Dos Passos in 1919. James Joyce came to Paris intending a two-day layover en route to London, and ended up staying until France fell to the Germans in World War 2. Sylvia Beach, the daughter of American missionaries, moved to Paris in 1917, and set up Shakespeare and Company, one of the world's most famous bookshops. F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald visited in 1921 and '24. (A year after that second visit, he would release his best-known work, set in this era, but in New York: The Great Gatsby. It is 100 years old this year.) Back to Paris, in the wake of the Great War, this was a city where people caught fish in the Seine for dinner, and toilets with aluminium containers were still emptied into cesspools that were cleared by horse-drawn wagons. But it was also the home of Picasso, Modigliani, Chagall and, on occasion, Salvador Dali. It was the city of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, of Coco Chanel and the singer Josephine Baker. It was a world of people who had been in the war young, were trying to build their own anchors — through art and sculpture and dance, stories and fashion and architecture — and didn't yet know another war was coming. *** The rootlessness was not restricted to Paris. In England, in 1922, TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, dissatisfied with life as a civil servant, applied to the Royal Air Force under the name TE Ross and was initially rejected, before people like Winston Churchill recommended he be accepted. The poet Robert Graves suffered so badly from shell shock that even the smell of flowers reminded him of the gas warfare attacks he had suffered as a soldier. Siegfried Sassoon, awarded the Military Cross, one of the war's highest decorations, became a poet and a conscientious objector. Wilfred Owen, generally considered one of the great poets of the war, was killed a week before its end, aged 25. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle / Can patter out their hasty orisons. / No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, / Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — / The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; / And bugles calling for them from sad shires… he wrote, in Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917). *** This was also the beginning of a new world for the Western woman. First, with the men off in the battlefields, they took up jobs in factories. Many lost their menfolk and breadwinners; the lucky among them received war-widow pensions, but others struggled. More women were forced to seek permanent employment. This, directly and indirectly, contributed to the movement for women's suffrage, and the right to vote was finally extended to them. Back to Stein's phrase, 'Lost Generation' soon began to be used beyond its original context of her inner circle of artists, poets and writers who flocked to Paris in the 1920s. It became the tag for anyone born between 1883 and 1900. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) would fit the bill, even though he never fought in the war, having been found medically unfit. The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), his best-known novels, deal with the sense of despair, alienation and fruitless search for meaning that would come to define the young adults of this age. But what about Hugh Lofting of Doctor Dolittle fame, or PG Wodehouse? Well, there never has been just one kind of art. This is a period that saw the rise, for instance, of the crime novel, with people essentially binge-reading the work of great British pulp-fiction writers such as Sax Rohmer (a former soldier and creator of the Chinese criminal mastermind Fu Manchu); Hermann McNeile aka Sapper of the Bulldog Drummond adventures (who was still serving when he began to write these tales, and would inspire authors such as Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean); Dornford Yates, who alternated been funny stories of upper-class Englishmen dealing with declining fortunes, and hard-edged spy thrillers, with characters that moved between genres. It wasn't just the men. Three of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the Golden Age of Mystery: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers in England, and Ngaio Marsh in New Zealand, were from this cohort. (The fourth, Margery Allingham, was born in 1904.) Christie served as a nurse with the Red Cross during World War 1, which left her with a vast knowledge of poisons (and a penchant for murderous nurses). Sayers, credited with popularising the statement 'It pays to advertise', also wrote the original advertising jingle for Guinness. Marsh toured as a stage actress during the war and would use her knowledge of stagecraft to great effect in her Roderick Alleyn books. *** Across the Atlantic, other Lost Generation authors were redefining the crime novel. Dashiell Hammett, an ambulance driver in the war, would define the 'hard-boiled' detective novel; a genre launched by Carroll John Daly's Three Gun Terry (1923). Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) would take up Hammett's mantle with gritty, hard edged crime thrillers such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. The Lost Generation changed children's literature as well. The Australian-British Pamela Lyndon Travers created Mary Poppins in 1934. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (1943) remains one of the bestselling books of all time. The Englishwoman Richmal Crompton created that irrepressible schoolboy William Brown in 1922. Air Force pilot WE Johns (also the man who rejected Lawrence's application to the RAF) created Biggles. And there was, of course, Enid Blyton (1897-1968). *** World War 1 made Hollywood what it is today. The destruction of European cinema in the war saw a wave of actors and directors make their way to America. There were so many movies being made in the US after the war — 80% of all movies made worldwide — that the studio system evolved, as did the producers who would dominate the industry's golden age: Louis B Mayer, Irving Thalberg, Harry Cohn, Jack L Warner. All the great silent comedians belonged to this generation: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, and Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx. So did many of the great directors who would transform cinema: Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair. And, of course, there were the actors. The South African-born Basil Rathbone crawled to the German side, across no-man's land, disguised as, of all things, a tree, to recover military intelligence that would earn him the Military Cross. He would go on to epitomise sneering British villainy in swashbuckling films, and is still considered one of the best portrayers of Sherlock Holmes. Claude Rains, who made every movie better just by being in it, and whose performance in Casablanca is still remembered, lost almost all the vision in one eye as a result of a gas attack. Within months of the war breaking out, Ronald Colman (A Tale of Two Cities, Prisoner of Zenda) had his leg shattered by a mortar shell, forcing him to crawl back to safety. The experience left him with an air of melancholic reserve that worked well for the characters created by another Lost Generation Englishman: James Hilton. His novels Lost Horizon (1933) and Random Harvest (1941) both featured world-weary protagonists scarred by the war. Colman played both men in the film adaptations. 'It was the war that made an actor out of me,' he would later say. 'I wasn't my own man anymore. We went out. Strangers came back.' (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Hence the sensibility
This muted, somewhat melancholy and very French approach to the Jane Austen update (mostly in French with English subtitles, with a smattering of English) has many low-key charms. The settings, central characters and lead performances are all lovely, in an understated way. Still, considering Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is partly a love letter to writing and writers, this romantic comedy from debut French filmmaker Laura Piani is a bit patchy when it comes to story. Agathe (Camille Rutherford of Anatomy of a Fall) is a would-be novelist who works at Paris's historic English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company. (Bibliophiles will be happy to see the bookish scenes are shot at the actual store.) Sony Pictures Classics Agathe is a would-be novelist looking for inspiration. Finding herself stalled out, both in her love life and her attempts to write a love story, Agathe compares herself to Jane Austen's Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion who fears her chance at happiness has passed. This could change, though, when Agathe is pushed by her best pal, Félix (Pablo Pauly of The French Dispatch), into attending the Jane Austen Residency, a two-week writers' retreat at a beautiful Georgian house in the English countryside. Agathe finds herself experiencing some romantic confusion when Felix sees her off at the cross-Channel ferry with a surprisingly passionate kiss. This perplexity is compounded when she's picked up on the British side by the arrogant but attractive Oliver (Charlie Anson, who's done offbeat Austen before in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Oliver, who works at the Residency, happens to be Jane Austen's 'great-great-great-great nephew,' though he finds Austen's writings 'a little overrated and limited in scope.' Piani, who has worked mostly in French TV (Spiral, Plan B), is dealing with the gambit faced by all Austen-related projects: her film has a built-in audience, but that audience has very exacting standards. Here Jane Austen functions mostly as a hook, which might disappoint some superfans. Agathe's story holds a generalized Janeite spirit, but the specific literary references are slight. (It should also be noted that the movie is not related to the 2009 novel Jane Austen Ruined My Life by American author Beth Pattillo. Confusing!) Agathe, like Austen herself, is a doting aunt and fond sister, and like many Austen heroines, she finds herself choosing between two men while trying to figure out her own moral and emotional development. Sony Pictures Classics Félix (Pablo Pauly, left) and Agathe are just friends, or are they? There's certainly a Pride and Prejudice vibe to Agathe and Oliver's frosty initial meeting, with Oliver channelling a bilingual Mr. Darcy with just a touch of Hugh Grant's Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility. And while Félix is a great best friend, Agathe worries he's maybe a bit too much like Mansfield Park's Henry Crawford, a compulsive charmer who can't commit. Still, for all the callbacks to Austen's early 1800s canon — Piani even supplies a Regency-costumed ball, with much dancing and glancing — this is a very 2020s work. Agathe sometimes feels as if she was 'born in the wrong century,' but her story is modern and French, with a lot of striped shirts, good coffee, alcohol and cigarettes — and also a bit of nudity and sex. There is some sisterhood with Bridget Jones. Agathe doesn't quite reach Bridget's level of comic klutziness, but she can be awkward and a little self-effacing. (When Félix suggests Agathe suffers from impostor syndrome, she tells him she's 'a genuine impostor.') And as with many modernized Austen heroines, Agathe is not dealing with social constraints — with not enough choice — but rather with too much choice. This especially applies to the wide-open options of what she calls 'Uber sex' and 'digital dating,' which she finds mostly involves guys tiptoeing out of her bed at night and trying not to wake her up. As a contemporary woman, Agathe is also struggling with work, in this case the writer's horror of the blank page, compounded by a past trauma she hasn't come to terms with. Sundays Kevin Rollason's Sunday newsletter honouring and remembering lives well-lived in Manitoba. This outline of Agathe's character arc sounds good, but with the film's swift 98-minute runtime, the outline is never quite filled in. Agathe's relationships with the other Residency participants, with the two men and even with herself remain vague. Sony Pictures Classics Like many Jane Austen heroines, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) finds herself choosing between two men. At one point, Agathe is arguing with an aggressive critical theorist about the purpose of literature, and she says she wants novels to reflect back to her what it means to be human. The film has bits of quiet humour, some less successful attempts at slapstick and some poignant scenes, but these beautiful moments don't quite add up to a fully developed story. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life could use a little more reflection. arts@ Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Los Angeles Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is a winning romance in which real life sneaks up on the bookish
'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is a catchy, provocative title for writer-director Laura Piani's debut feature, but it is a bit of a misnomer. Her heroine, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), may harbor that fear deep inside, but it's never one she speaks aloud. A lonely clerk working at the famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, she gets lost in the love notes left on the store's mirror and complains to her best friend and coworker Felix (Pablo Pauly) that she was born in the wrong century, unwilling to engage in casual 'digital' connection. Highly imaginative, Agathe perhaps believes she's alone because she won't settle for anything less than a Darcy. Good thing, then, that Felix, posing as her agent, sends off a few chapters of her fantasy-induced writing to the Jane Austen Residency. And who should pick up Agathe from the ferry but a handsome, prickly Englishman, Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ms. Austen herself. She can't stand him. It's perfect. 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is the kind of warm romance that will make any bookish dreamer swoon, as a thoroughly modern woman with old-fashioned ideas about love experiences her own Austenesque tumble. While Agathe initially identifies with the wilting old maid Anne from 'Persuasion,' her shyly budding connection with Oliver is more Elizabeth Bennet in 'Pride and Prejudice.' A pastoral English estate is the ideal setting for such a dilemma. The casting and performances are excellent for this contemporary, meta update: Rutherford is elegant but often awkward and fumbling as Agathe, while Anson conveys Oliver's passionate yearning behind his reserved, wounded exterior with just enough Hugh Grantian befuddlement. Pauly plays the impulsive charlatan with an irrepressible charm. But it isn't just the men that have Agathe in a tizzy. The film is equally as romantic about literature, writing and poetry as it is about such mundane issues as matters of the flesh. A lover of books, Agathe strives to be a writer but believes she isn't one because of her pesky writer's block. It's actually a dam against the flow of feelings — past traumas and heartbreaks — that she attempts to keep at bay. It's through writing that Agathe is able to crack her heart open, to share herself and to welcome in new opportunities. 'Writing is like ivy,' Oliver tells Agathe. 'It needs ruins to exist.' It's an assurance that her past hasn't broken her but has given her the necessary structure to let the words grow. The way the characters talk about what literature means to them — and what it means to put words down — will seduce the writerly among the viewers, these discussions even more enchanting than any declarations of love or ardent admiration. If you've read any Austen (or watched any of the films made from her novels), Piani's movie will be pleasantly predictable in its outcome, but that doesn't mean it's not an enjoyable journey. It's our expectations, both met and upended, that give the film its appealing cadence. It never lingers too long and is just sweet enough in its displays to avoid any saccharine aftertaste or eye-rolling sentiment. There's a salve-like quality to 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,' a balm for any battered romantic's soul. It may be utter fantasy, but it's the kind of escape you'll want to revisit again and again, like a favorite Austen novel. And, as it turns out, our main character is wrong. Jane Austen didn't wreck her life, rather, she opened it up to the possibilities that were right in front of her. Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
Wall Street Journal
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' Review: Writing and Romancing
Born 250 years ago, Jane Austen remains the reigning queen of the marriage plot and, by extension, the romantic comedy. So if there's something a bit discourteous in the title of writer-director Laura Piani's new rom-com, 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,' chalk it up to the anxiety of influence. That supposedly wrecked life belongs to Agathe (Camille Rutherford), a Parisian bookseller at the venerable Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank. There, she guides new readers to old books, Austen's especially, and has an affectionate, uninhibited friendship with Félix (Pablo Pauly), who keeps her up to date with his womanizing exploits and tries to prod her into shedding her spinsterhood. But she has no interest in modern-day 'Uber sex,' as she puts it—app-based, transient, possibly malodorous. She instead spends her free time writing romantic stories that she seems never able to finish, a fact that has some unsubtle implications about her own love life.
Chicago Tribune
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' review: Writing and living her own private rom-com
A pleasant, low-friction bit of romantic fiction, 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' is the first feature from writer-director Laura Piani. In her mid-20s, Piani worked in Paris in the venerable English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company, a primary location in this debut project. When Piani took a job there, she'd already had her head filled as a teenager by the smart women and foolish choices, happily avoided, created by the author and life-wrecker of this film's title. The story's nice and simple. It takes its aspiring-novelist protagonist outside her comfort zone, from Paris to an Austen writing residency in England. Piani's film is, in itself, a comfort zone for viewers, the latest of many cinematic mash notes to Jane Austen, from 'Clueless' to four 'Bridget Jones' movies. Pulling from the filmmaker's life, the character of Agathe — played with untheatrical gravity and hints of a blithe spirit in the making by Camille Rutherford — spends her days among the stacks at Shakespeare and Company, sorting, helping customers, dishing with her good friend and fellow employee Felix (Pablo Pauly). He's bachelor No. 1, a bit of a cad but reasonably charming about it. His intentions may be up in the air regarding Agathe, but he looks out for her. He sneaks a look at the chapters she's written and, impressed, submits them behind her back to the Austen residency for consideration. It works, and reluctantly Agatha accepts the two weeks in the English countryside with other invitees toiling on their own projects. Earlier, in an anxious state over the prospect of finishing her novel, Agathe is pessimistic. Felix mansplains that she suffers from imposter syndrome. Her reply: 'No, I don't, I'm a imposter.' The scenario's bachelor No. 2 arrives in the brooding personage of Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great-great-great-great-nephew of Austen herself. He's no fan, though ('overrated'), which gives Agathe, the visitor he picks up at the ferry landing, something to argue about straight off. From there, Piani's film does its self-assigned work in solid if programmatic fashion, establishing a back bench of supporting characters at the residency, as well as at home in Paris where Agathe, who hasn't dated in a couple of years, lives with her sister and nephew. She's a tough nut, emotionally guarded in the wake of the sisters' parents' death in a car crash. These circumstances are layered enough to make 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' a little more than rom-com piffle, though there's little romantic tension in Piani's triangle since Oliver is the auxiliary Mr. Darcy here, and therefore a pre-ordained match made in literary heaven. Shot entirely in France, the movie renders its ideas of romantic melancholy and Agathe's default romantic defeatism in ways that reassure the audience every second. Agathe is either inside her beautiful bookshop, her beautiful, sunny Parisian domicile or roaming a beautiful house and grounds for knocking out a novel while your heart figures things out. Piani did the right thing in casting Rutherford, whose physical embodiment of Agathe suggests a tall, gangly, striking woman trying not to be seen. The actress leans into the character's unsettled, often sullen side, though not at the expense of the comic tropes (at one point, nude, she walks through her bathroom door, which turns out to be Oliver's room). Rutherford provides the internal friction throughout, while the generally frictionless mechanics of the movie itself hum along, with soothing sights and sounds. These include the fine actress Liz Crowther, as the Austen residency's hostess, quoting Wordsworth's notion of the best part of life: the 'little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.' 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' — 3 stars (out of 4) MPA rating: R (for language, some sexual content, and nudity) Running time: 1:34 How to watch: Premieres in select theaters May 23
