![]() ![]() Such norms are often broken because people are broken, but when those norms are abandoned altogether the world becomes an unhappy place, and even worse, an unfunny place. Prior Stillman characters may live in a modern world that stretches those boundaries, but they long for Austen era principles. Austen’s characters inhabit a society guided by rules, codes and commandments. The characters in his earlier films often behave as though they are following an Austen code of conduct, sometimes talking about or even quoting the author, who died in 1817. What might seem a stretch for Stillman has proved to be a wise move, and hardly a radical one. In his new film, “Love and Friendship,” Stillman, directing his own adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella, “Lady Susan,” has stepped away from his modern urban niche, and set his latest satire of class and privilege in the 18th Century British countryside. When it’s over, I leave the theater feeling underbred, under-read and underdressed, as though I should have worn a bow tie and white bucks to the showing. Staged in the one per-center world of débutante balls (“Metropolitan”), velvet rope enclosed dance palaces (“The Last Days of Disco”) or elite college campuses (“Damsels in Distress”), a Stillman comedy of manners is as much manners as it is comedy. A Whit Stillman film can be more petit four than layer cake. ![]()
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