My streaming gem: why you should watch Love & Friendship

The latest in our series of writers highlighting lesser-seen gems is a recommendation of Whit Stillman’s acerbic Jane Austen adaptation

Though the novels of Jane Austen positively drip with witticisms, catty descriptive asides and zingy ironies, their film versions all too often tend to soft-sell the comedy. Emma Thompson’s elegant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was wry and knowing, though only the most hopeful of high-school English teachers would argue for it as genuinely side-splitting; Joe Wright’s take on Pride and Prejudice played up swooning romance over barbed interplay. Both the Paltrow- and Taylor-Joy-starring iterations of Emma are light, pastel-hued baubles, but more feathery than they are genuinely funny; the laughs only came with a rewrite as drastic as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.

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Love & Friendship, then, is a delicious rarity: an Austen interpretation taken on by an established, distinctive comic film-maker, bent to his cockeyed sensibility even as it honours the zesty, cutting hilarity of the original text. When it was announced that Whit Stillman was adapting Austen’s relatively obscure, posthumous published novella Lady Susan, the marriage seemed almost too perfectly arranged, even if Stillman is as Waspishly American as Austen was Waspishly English. Known for his ultra-arch, hyper-literate satires of preppy, privileged pockets of east coast society – from his Oscar-nominated debut Metropolitan to his peculiar spin on the campus comedy, Damsels in Distress – Stillman has something of Austen’s gift for smuggling razor-edged observations in silky formalities. To watch him work through her is to make you wonder how prime Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder might have tackled the author.

In lieu of such hypotheticals, Love & Friendship will do very nicely indeed. Released six years ago now, it has since acquired the older-feeling patina of easy rewatchability; insufficiently seen and celebrated at the time, it deserves to become a comfort-watching standard. A corset comedy made with a springy screwball sensibility and the darkly venal undertow of Dangerous Liaisons, it is, for my money, the best Jane Austen film made to date.

That it achieves this by adapting one of the author’s own least essential works is a testament to Stillman’s resourcefulness as a writer, as well as the general maxim that minor literature is often better served on screen than major. A work of juvenilia, but not published until a half-century after Austen’s death, Lady Susan is an epistolary trifle that differs from her better-known novels in its anti-romantic outlook and cynical preoccupation with bad behaviour gone largely unpunished. Its title character is a gleefully unscrupulous heroine and villainess in one, irresistible in her self-serving wit and cleverness. A young widow striving and seducing her way through the upper classes, she aims to both get the guy and thwart The Man, using her own gormless daughter as a decoy if it gets her closer to the prize.

If the book’s letter-based structure revealed Lady Susan’s moral dubiousness first-hand through her caustic, withering tone, Stillman’s film fleshes out a wider world at her feet, warming her up a little in the process. On film, she’s the tastiest of characters – queen bee, black widow and femme fatale, all in fabulous millinery to boot – and a career-crowning role for Kate Beckinsale, who to that point had been languishing in one anonymous B-thriller and Underworld installment after another. Love & Friendship plays on Beckinsale’s signature cut-glass hauteur, but lets her be messy and sexy beneath the serene surface: an English rose with racing sexual energy and an unapologetically dark heart. She has a wicked way with a one-liner, too, lending an Austenite dignity to Stillman’s preppy quippiness: “What a shame you married Mr Johnson,” she observes to her American confidante Alicia, played by Chloe Sevigny with a deadpan drollness that brings some modern slacker energy to these buttoned-up surroundings. “He’s too old to be governable and too young to die.”

Men are treated as punchlines throughout Love & Friendship, none more riotously than Sir James Martin, a dim, wealthy patsy who becomes an integral figure in Lady Susan’s social climbing strategy – and who the British character actor Tom Bennett plays with sublime, clockwork-timed idiocy, ensuring that Beckinsale doesn’t get to strut off with the whole film. The London Film Critics’ Circle handed well-deserved prizes to both actors; otherwise, this impeccable comedy of good manners and very bad behaviour went largely unnoticed by awards voters, proving that even highbrow literary adaptations must pay a price for levity. No matter, since the film is already aging beautifully: a Jane Austen film made with palpable love for the source, and a riotous confidence in its own comic voice.