22 maj 2025
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” was produced by Sciapode.
'Piani’s screenplay for “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” walks a tricky line with mostly sure footing. It visibly fiddles with Austen’s romantic and narrative conventions, the ones that have been replicated across romantic comedies for a couple of centuries: awkward encounters, declarations of love, secondary characters invented for levity, passionate glances across a crowded room. That the movie is partly in French and partly in English adds extra possibilities for comedy — always make sure the person you’re complaining about on the phone doesn’t understand the language you’re speaking — and is a nice twice on the normally Anglophiliac subgenre.
Piani’s story also seems aware that the women Austen wrote about, with enough means to live fairly comfortably and take time for leisure pursuits, are going to encounter romance differently from their 21st-century compatriots. No matter how old-fashioned the heroine’s tastes and preferences are, she isn’t living, and can’t live, in Austen’s world.'