By M. Faust
(Image above, L-R: Charlie Anson and Camille Rutherford in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life)

If you find Jane Austen overrated and have been waiting for a film that would knock her down a peg, you might anticipate from its title that Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is the movie for you. You would be wrong. Very, very wrong indeed. 

The heroine and presumed speaker of the titular statement is Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), a thirty-something Parisienne who yearns to be a writer like her idol, Jane Austen. Her short stories begin well but never get finished, and the novel she has started hits a dead wall after a few chapters. Working at the famed Shakespeare & Co. bookstore allows her to rub elbows with the great names in literature, but she has otherwise grown isolated, living with her sister and young nephew and reluctant to travel. Her romantic life of late has been limited to an ambiguous quasi-relationship with fellow employee Felix (Pablo Pauly), an unregenerate womanizer. 

Snooping in her laptop one day, Felix reads the beginnings of Agathe’s novel and is impressed. Without telling her he sends the chapters off in an application for a writer’s residency in a house where Austen once lived, run by her descendants. She is accepted and reluctantly agrees to attend. 

Suspense is not what this film is about. When Agathe clashes with the son of her hosts, Oliver (Charlie Anson), a professor of contemporary literature who considers his ancestor a “limited” writer, you know exactly where that relationship is headed. Nor do you need to be an Austen aficionado to realize that the promise of a ball at this country house will be fraught with more than waltzes. 

Laura Piani (who worked at Shakespeare & Co. for a decade) cites Ernest Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, James Ivory and the comedies of Mike Leigh as inspirations for this, her first feature as a writer-director. The story takes a back seat to characterizations, which are uniformly charming. I would have liked to see more interaction among Agathe and the other writer in residence; I suspect that avid Austen fans would have appreciated more direct links to the novels they have been reading and re-reading for years. But on its own modest terms, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a pleasant chance to enjoy in a theater the kind of romantic comedy that has largely been shifted to streaming.