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.
