![]() “In fact, she sort of gets every single thing she wants. I kept thinking, ‘When is she going to get punished? When is she going to die?’ “I just assumed that’s what Whit had done because Lady Jane seemed so atypical of a romantic literature heroine. It wasn’t an accident that Scorsese cast her as Ava Gardner, movie star, in ‘The Aviator.’ She’s a perfect modern-day movie star.”īefore making the movie, Beckinsale had no knowledge of Austen’s “Lady Susan.” Initially, when Stillman contacted her, she imagined he’d come up with his own forward-thinking heroine.īeckinsale says, “I remember when I had done ‘Emma,’ there was a writer in England who had written a sort of sequel to ‘Emma’ and that was a fashion for a time, people writing in the style of Jane Austen and selling a book. “Not many people, these days, manage careers as well as she has done. “Kate is really funny and really smart and we can easily imagine her masterminding and plotting because she’s masterminded and plotted her stardom,” he says. ![]() Stillman so effortlessly, elegantly bridges the gap between his conniving aristocrats and Austens that its difficult to say where ones sensibility ends and the others begins. ![]() During a time when women had little agency, Susan is a widow willing to manipulate her way into suitable marriages for herself and her daughter. For Stillman, “Love & Friendship” marks a reunion of Beckinsale and Sevigny, both of whom appeared in his 1998 comedy, “The Last Days of Disco.” Whit Stillman may have fashioned the finest Jane Austen movie this year: the delightfully droll Love & Friendship, based on Austens novella Lady Susan. Based on the lesser-known epistolatory Jane Austen novella Lady Susan, published 54 years after Austen's death, 'Love & Friendship' makes an antihero of the conniving title character (Kate Beckinsale). ![]()
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