It takes the full running time of Love & Friendship to discover just how cunning and self-centred its protagonist is less time to be certain how intelligent. Stillman is experienced at putting unpleasant characters to the fore of his films. Lady Susan’s subjective filling in the blanks for her best friend introduces an element of tension that keeps us interested to the end: does she exaggerate her upper hand will she be undone?
Stillman fills his film with holes doors close on consequential conversations, leaving the viewer shifting from foot to foot in the hall. The film’s focus is Lady Susan’s scheming, the precise aims of which are withheld from the viewer, albeit we know what she covets: a steady flow of money and a man to slake her lust. As she reminds her teenaged daughter, “We don’t live, we visit.”
Stillman returns periodically to these frank exchanges (conducted in secret – Alicia is forbidden by her husband to meet with the dissolute widow), imparting structure to a film that is otherwise as peripatetic as its heroine, who has nowhere to hang her ostentatious, ostrich-feathered hats. Love & Friendship, his fifth film, adapts Austen’s Lady Susan – a lesser-known epistolary novella – converting many of the letters that pass between the title character and her confidante Alicia into tête-à-têtes. Among other qualities, it’s this that makes Stillman so eligible a proxy for Jane Austen. Ireland/France/The Netherlands/USA/United Kingdom 2016Īlicia Johnson (an American) Chloë SevignyĪs in Barcelona, so in Stillman’s other films: talking – in rooms, in bars, inside cars, on the dance floor – precipitates incident dialogue has consequences.
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