Stillman's ability to compartmentalize text and subtext allows the story's comedy to really shine. Indeed, many scenes center on the characters delivering letters to each other. For the most part, he only presents scenes the characters would have talked about in their letters to each other, and the hidden subtext - the love affairs and quarrels that people would leave out of their correspondence - stays off-screen, for viewers to tease out on their own based on reading between the lines of dialogue. Stillman's solution is kind of brilliant. The movie screen, which tends to literalize everything, makes the funnier aspects of her writing difficult to adapt. The comedy in much of Austen's work comes from the gap between what people say and what they mean, or between what's actually happening and what people understand. See, Lady Susan is an epistolary story - meaning it's told entirely via letters the characters write to each other - so the only action depicted on the page is somebody writing a letter (if you want to be really literal about it). Roadside Attractionsĭirector Whit Stillman's screenplay for the film tackles one of Lady Susan's most difficult adaptation issues head-on. 1) The film's structure is unexpectedly brilliant This is Whit Stillman, director and writer of Love & Friendship. It will be hard to find a sharper comedy this summer than Love & Friendship (which will arrive on Amazon Prime later in the year, for all you streaming fans). In Love & Friendship, for better or worse, she's the Walter White of polite British society, charging into quiet drawing rooms with only her self-interest in mind and attempting to finagle her way into an advantageous marriage, all while marrying off her daughter to someone the poor girl has no interest in. What's more, it just might make you a believer in Kate Beckinsale, who had a number of rich roles in British film and TV before she broke through in the US with Pearl Harbor and mostly ended up playing a bunch of wives and girlfriends. But it's mostly an incredibly funny comedy of manners about how to deal with those unpleasant people who insist on forcing themselves into your life. The new adaptation of her novella Lady Susan (confusingly, Austen also wrote a novella called Love and Freindship, but this film is not an adaptation of that) has its romantic elements, sure.
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