I have enjoyed putting together this post and it makes me want to watch it again and maybe reconsider my opinion.
Some commentary from articles because I am too lazy to form my thoughts into prescient prose:
Unserious Austen - Adam Thirlwell - New York Review of Books
Jane Austen’s Lady Susan (written around 1794, when she was eighteen) is an epistolary novel, and a balletic farce of sex and money. Its plot centers on the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, “the most accomplished Coquette in England,” and her attempts to marry her daughter Frederica to Sir James Martin, a wealthy if charmless aristocrat, while she conducts affairs with two younger men: Lord Manwaring, and Reginald De Courcy.
It’s a quieter, English-country-house-version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses—where a ruthless woman is humiliated.
This adaptation is really a rewrite. And maybe that’s a particularly attractive mode, when the novel to be adapted is in epistolary form. The game of the epistolary novel is to maintain a constant haze between foreground and background, between what is reported to a correspondent and what the reader must infer has happened: it is the art form of gossip, of the hint.
Stillman’s characters are monsters of literary conversation. In Austen’s Lady Susan, her heroine makes a major observation to her friend Mrs. Johnson. It’s meant as evidence of immorality, but in Stillman’s film it is a charming statement of fact. “If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence. Consideration and Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty. And here I have opportunity enough for the exercise of my Talent, as the chief of my time is spent in Conversation.” For in this new world invented by Stillman, people talk syntactically, at high speed, with absolute artistry (one comparison, in a different register, but at a similar pitch of artificiality, is Tarantino). Stillman uses dialogue the way Matisse uses color: it does not necessarily correspond to anything in the real world.
At such moments, trying to examine Love & Friendship, our definitions like adaptationor rewrite become faintly anachronistic, or clumsy. It’s a novel transformed into cinema, but it’s also a film that has allowed itself to be contaminated by literature. And that is the rarer, and greater, achievement.
Very interesting commentary on the film and adaption in this video.
Interesting what Jemma Redgrave says at about 25 seconds - no, it doesn't feel like an Austen. Maybe because of the different format and how it was a novella written early on when she was around 18 - maybe it was unfinished for a reason.
And some pictures to delight:
A great collection of the "opening and end title design, plus character intros and a variety of intertitles" from the film - here. Definitely worth looking at.
