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From 84 Charing Cross Road to Notting Hill romantic denouements that revolve around bookstores have always held cinematic allure. The Shop Around The Corner, by Ernst Lubitsch, was given a bookish twist by Nora Ephron with You’ve Got Mail, and the 21st century has given wave to many rom-coms set amongst the bookshelves. The writer par excellence who has revolutionised the way love dynamics have been told through literature, is the one who portrayed women as humans and not as idolised figures or monsters: Jane Austen. The 18th century author has been homaged by motion pictures, not only with screen adaptations of her novels, but also with films that tribute the way her writings have inspired readers, one of them being The Jane Austen Book Club.
Recently, a new film has entered the scene through a film director whose experience and feature intertwine with the history of a very famous bookshop: Shakespeare and Company. Filmmaker Laura Piani, during her film studies, became a bookseller in the Anglo-Saxon sanctuary set in the heart of Paris’ Latin Quarter. Time would tell how this experience would eventually be conveyed in her feature film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
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The movie is not a biopic about Shakespeare and Company, however many elements are sprinkled to provide insight on the history of the bookshop. Attentive spectators will spot a writing behind the protagonist’s bookshop that reads:
“This store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are more real to me than my next door neighbours and even stranger to me is the fact that even before I was born Dostoyevsky wrote the story of my life in a book called The Idiot and ever since reading it, I have been searching the year 1600 our whole building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In medieval times each monastery had a ‘frère lampier’ whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years. Now it is my daughter’s turn. George Whitman.”
George Whitman, was the founder and proprietor of the second Shakespeare and Company, that was named after the original bookstore of the same name on Paris’s Left Bank, that run from 1919 to 1941 with a woman at the helm: Sylvia Beach. (It doesn’t surprise that George Whitman named his daughter, who today runs the bookshop, after her). Sylvia Beach gave birth to Shakespeare and Company after discovering Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop called La Maison des Amis des Livres, that sold French literature. Inspired by this cultural haven, she embarked upon the mission to do the same with an English-language bookstore in Paris, that eventually became the literary salon for the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.
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If Sylvia was an example of how the efforts of a woman — just like those of Jane Austen — can be the driving force of her destiny, Laura Piani has conveyed this literary energy in her own cinematic tale that modernises the Regency heroine. In Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is a gawky single woman, who works in the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop.
Had she lived in England between the Elizabethan and Victorian era she would have been labelled as a spinster. But thankfully the story is different in our epoch, even though she is an old soul who fantasises of experiencing a romance akin to a Jane Austen novel. Agathe also dreams of being a successful writer, but is plagued by writers block. Things change when her friend and colleague, Felix (Pablo Pauly), gets her invited to the Jane Austen Writers’ Residency in England. In Albion, Agathe will be greeted by the descendant of Jane Austen, Oliver (Charlie Anson), and start her path to self-worth as a novelist and woman.
The film is a very efficacious dissection of the way love is experienced today. It unveils the phenomenon of breadcrumbing, as much as all the correlated characteristics of dating in the digital realm. Agathe represents one of many who feel they are living in the wrong century. She experiences Anemoia, the nostalgia for a time she’s never known. She feels like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, and knows exactly what Jane Austen novel can correspond to each person who asks her for reading recommendations. Literature is her balm, because as she strongly believes that: “Some books become part of our lives. They enter our most intimate selves and some of them move in forever, they help us to live because they reveal to us our true nature.” That poetic spark — that serves as a lens to reflect upon day-to-day matters — is very well constructed in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, and enhanced by the impeccable performance of the entire cast.
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Music also plays a significant role in this film, for the way it coalesces the dreaminess of the Jane Austen themes, with the pragmatic love entanglements that affect our century. Opening the film with the song Cry To Me, not only is a nod to another film about female emancipation (Dirty Dancing), but genuinely provides the ground for the heroine’s journey to find her self-esteem. Je T’aime À l’Italienne is just as appropriate in dispatching through music the kind of love Agathe is pursuing. Whilst the piece that plays during the reenactment ball — the Amour Et Printemps waltz — is the quintessential touch for the unraveling of Agathe’s love triangle.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life brings to the silver screen the way fiction can be salvific to the burdens of existence. After all, as Agathe says at one point, “Literature is like an ambulance speeding through the night to save someone.”
Final Grade: B+