Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Love And Friendship, starring Kate Beckindale, Xavier Samuel, based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 2016

Damn my old friend and former colleague at American Film Gazette Sam Lowell whom I replaced as film critic at this site although occasionally writes some “think” pieces now that he is no longer under any deadline. His damnation centers on the tendency that he had when he got interested in a type of film or an author/writer and do a “run” based on that interest (still does so when writing about film noir which he been doing a slow moving “run” B-grade noirs on recently). Over the many years I have known him I also seemed to have picked up the habit. The habit in the present case being taking a “run” at various films based on Jane Austen’s novels and other works after having viewed the film The Jane Austen Book Club. Well we are going down that trail once again with the film adaptation of her early work Lady Susan using the title of another Austen work Love and Friendship.     

The scheme in Book Club was to take a modern book club membership and develop the plot of the film around the similarity of relationships among them to those in Austen’s six major novels. No question that one Jane Austen was an astute observer of the social mores and ethos of the later 18^th century, early 19^th century English country gentry, a strata of society which if it didn’t have the prestige of the upper nobility nevertheless owned the vast tracts of land and controlled the doings of the Parliament in those days that made the kingdom work. Here dear Jane looks at the mating rituals of that country gentry whose members were always in the end driven by the need to avoid dropping down the social ladder. That is most definitely the concern of the lead character Lady Susan, played by Kate Beckindale, whose aim is just that desire to avoid dropping down in her circumstances-and because inheritance is everything just look at the obtuse Common Law provisions that of her daughter.      

    

Let the games begin. Bring a scorecard. Lady Susan is on the rebound having been tossed out of one manor for going toe to toe with the lord of said manor. So off she goes to the country estate of her brother-in law and wife with her lady companion to see what she can dig up to restore her diminished sources. Before long she has that brother-in-law’s wife’s brother, Reginald played by Xavier Samuel, eating out of her hand despite himself (despite knowing that she is in modern language a “tramp”). But his/their father said no way, forget it. Still that brother is not so easy to convince of milady’s sullen sooty character and things look like he will be snagged.

Then all hell breaks loose Lady Susan as it turned out was still going toe to toe with that randy lord and his wife found out about it through a letter delivered by Reginald. The long and short of it is that Lady Susan was forced to call off her relationship with promising Reginald although that is not the last we will see of him. Enter Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica along with a goof companion Sir James Martin. Once Reginald sees Frederica they quickly become an item and goof Sir James is left empty-handed. Well not quite since on the rebound and fiercely committed to her own cozy future she picks up Sir James. All’s well that ends well. With this scenario it is a wonder that Britain was able to rule the world for as long as it did. Hey, what do you think maybe it was because of it.