#Kris creating blindspots for the player

[classpect-sideblog]

Kris is a Knight of Doom

Susie is a Rouge of Hope

Ralsei is an Heir of Void

Noelle is a Sylph of Rage

[reactingtosomething]

Reacting to Love & Friendship

What Women Aren’t Supposed to Do

The Setup: We’re always excited to bring in another Guest Reactor, and today’s is a long time coming. Keely is a lawyer, professor, and award-winning screenwriter who for all that somehow doesn’t make the rest of us feel bad about ourselves, because she’s also the nicest. Happily for us (and for you), Keely told Marchae she wanted to react to something before we could work up the nerve to ask. Even more happily for Kris in particular, she is like him a big Kate Beckinsale fan, which meant she was game for Love & Friendship. The devilishly funny Jane Austen adaptation, written and directed by Whit Stillman, was possibly Kris’s favorite movie of 2016 (with Arrival being the main reason for the qualifier).

It’s also relatively short, and streaming on Amazon Prime, so you could even watch it right now and read this afterward. Just saying.

GIFs from here. A (very) few post-chat notes from Kris in italics.

KEELY: Ready when you are!

KRIS: Hey! I’m so glad this is happening

KEELY: I'm a slow typer on text, so bear with me. ;)

Me too!

Thanks for asking me to do this. 

KRIS: No, seriously, you’re half the reason I first pitched having guest reactors months ago. But let’s dive in. Was Love and Friendship something on your radar at all when it came out?

KEELY: Yes. I I think I see almost every romcom that comes out. I feel it's important to know what else is being made, what's finding success, what's not, as I try to create my own original modern romantic comedies.

Plus, Kate Beckinsale. 

KRIS: YES to that. I’m not proud to have first become a Kate Beckinsale fan because I was in high school when Underworld came out, but then I also saw Serendipity and was glad to have good reasons to like her.

KEELY: Serendipity is what did it for me too. Fan for life. 

[SPOILERS after the jump]

KRIS: I’m not like an Austen expert or anything (actually haven’t seen most adaptations), but I was fond of what I read of hers in high school, and Matt Quinn [a professor we both had, though at different times] had recommended that I look at Whit Stillman for a feature rewrite, so this was definitely a lot of things I both wanted and needed. Did you like it/what’s your Austen history/can you imagine talking about a Jane Austen adaptation with Matt Quinn?

KEELY: I wouldn't say that I am an Austen aficionado, but I have seen most of the adaptations of her work over the years. In general, I enjoy epic love stories with extraordinary costuming and scenery. As to Austen in particular, I appreciate the strong female characters she was creating long before anyone else was. What I particularly liked about Love & Friendship, however, is that it was more light-hearted than Austen's other works. While it maintained her trademark strong-willed, independent female heroine, it included so much more comedy than typically present in her stories. I thought it was a lot of fun!

And, no, I can't imagine Matt being even remotely interested in Jane Austen!

But he's got a good eye. What Stillman did with this film was not typical Austen - it was a fresh new twist on the genre.

KRIS: (sorry for any delayed responses on this end, I think my computer is just getting your messages slowly)

The lightness definitely struck me too. I loved the portrait-y “title card” things, which were such a good way to telegraph the overall cheekiness of the movie that I assumed they were in the script, but I read somewhere that they only occurred to Stillman after the fact

KEELY: I read the script, and didn't notice them in there either. I liked it too. It added to the fun and comedy of the movie overall. It reminded me of the quirkiness of The Royal Tenenbaums. 

I also read that Jane Austen's original novella was a series of letters, which makes Whitman's adaptation even more interesting. 

KRIS: Right! And there are still hints of that not just in how dialogue-driven and seemingly “uncinematic” it is, but in how a fair amount of the action (like one of Susan’s arguments with Reginald) happens off-screen

Also, the elder Lady DeCourcy immediately became one of my favorite characters in that scene where Sir DeCourcy read Catherine’s letter to her

“My eyes have definitely cleared”

KEELY: I found that scene compelling as well. There was a sense of sweetness in marriage. My biggest criticism of the film is the lack of parity between the men and the women. The men in general are fairly dopey, manipulated by the women around them, as if pawns in a game. 

KRIS: I get that, though I guess part of the reason it didn’t bother me is that everyone’s at least a little dopey, and out of their depth; even Susan sometimes seems to have massive blindspots

I also weirdly identify with Charles’s whole always-has-a-reason-to-say-yes thing

KEELY: Agreed. And that's part of the comedy - the complete disconnect between the characters at times. Part of Stillman's genius in the film is not taking Austen too seriously. However, I always hate to see a man empowered at the expense of a woman, and am equally adverse to seeing a woman empowered at the expense of a man. I prefer romcoms where both of the players learn from each other, where there is more parity.  That, to me, is where the chemistry comes from.

Loved Charles. Dopey, but lovable. And that nugget – always doing the right thing at the right time - is very sweet. And, yet, where's the chemistry?! ;) 

I guess I would say that Love & Friendship played fabulously as a comedy (Lady Susan, Sir James - laugh out loud funny!) but fell a bit short on romance for me.

KRIS: Definitely true that it isn’t really a chemistry-driven movie, and it’s interesting that Susan being this sort of force of nature ends up meaning she doesn’t get a Darcy-like sparring partner

I LOVED Sir James

Always looking up for some reason

KEELY: He's an absolute scene stealer! Tom Bennett could not play that part any better. Genius.

KRIS: I’m not sure if I’d say this felt underdeveloped, exactly, but I would have liked a better sense of Susan and Alicia’s history and friendship

Maybe because of most of my formative pop culture being superhero and action stuff that routinely fails the Bechdel Test, adult me is always fascinated by really well-drawn friendships between women

KEELY: I think the story overall was a little bit thin. I don't say that necessarily as a criticism, because again I think the story works best as a comedy. But I too would have liked just a bit more backstory on the characters. And, being a romcom writer, would've liked to have seen why the characters fell in love.

Much of the courting happens off screen or in montage scenes. To your comment about Darcy-like sparring, I think that, for me, was what was missing.

KRIS: I have So Many Questions about Lord Manwaring

KEELY: Good point regarding the Alicia and Susan friendship. Those scenes were so much fun to watch. They highlight what was truly great about this film - the idea of women trying to find an avenue of liberation in an oppressive, male-dominated society. Lady Susan is doing what women aren't supposed to do – manipulate her circumstances, sleep around, outsmart men, dictate her own future. When Sir James meets with Alicia in the end, he finds it laughable that women would cheat on men. And that's laughable to us! It's exactly what Lady Susan is doing. She's breaking the rules. This is groundbreaking for a heroine of her time. And it still plays today. Which makes it fun. I'm all like, "Yea, girl, don't let them slut shame you." ;)

KRIS: Yes, I was really, really struck by how there’s this surprising harshness built into the very premise of I guess really all of Austen’s matchmaking stories, but that I hadn’t thought much about before this: Susan’s literally trying to make sure she and Frederica have roofs over their head next week, and all of her (hilarious) cruelty comes from trying to make that happen

One of the movie’s shortest but best lines: “We don’t live, we visit.”

KEELY: Lord Manwaring. Talk about an underdeveloped character! Although, I think this works so well for Lady Susan's character. For all of her scheming, planning and plotting, in the end she's just as susceptible to attraction and infatuation as all of the men infatuated with her.

By not knowing Lord Manwaring, it boils the relationship down to its essence - sex. Another rule Lady Susan is breaking. ;-)

And while we're on the subject of Lady Susan, can we just talk about the wicked dialogue?

KRIS: Absolutely

I planned to take notes on my rewatch, which Marchae is really good about, and I mostly just wrote down lines

You’ve touched on how there’s kind of a lack of Feeling in this movie that tilts it into a particular area of comedy, and there’s an interesting balancing act in reminding us that the stakes are kind of brutishly existential while having Susan float so high above it all. And I guess it’s exactly because the stakes are so high that the flippant-ness of Susan’s dialogue is so funny

KEELY: It's so hyper verbal. So many witty, ironic, multi-layered lines embedded to very even-keeled monologues. I was afraid to look away for even a second for fear of missing a line of incredible dialogue!

I love your reference to Lady Susan floating above it all. My favorite line: "I vastly prefer the generous spirit of a Manwaring who, deeply convinced of one's merit, is satisfied that whatever one does is right." On the surface, she's talking about a quality she likes in a man. Really, though, she's talking about herself. This is why I love her. Because she's honest with herself, and she approves of herself and the choices she's making. That's empowerment.

KRIS: Oh that line about Manwaring is a great catch. I also love that Susan gets to be all of those things you say, but also -- in what are some of her funniest lines -- totally unreasonable and hypocritical about some things, exactly because she never stops to question herself. Only Alicia ever manages to provoke introspection

“and as an element of friendship is involved, I’m sure the paying of wages would be offensive to us both”

“A worthy lover should assume one has unanswerable motives for all one does!”

And then there are times when she’s tooootally spot-on, even when her overall goal in the scene is to be manipulative, like when she defends James to Reginald -- “the incomprehension of the rich and easeful” and all that

Susan getting too real: “But any man, navigating the cascades of romantic courtship, and occasionally falling into those foaming waters, is apt not to appear at his best.”

KEELY: "Facts are horrid things!" 😂 As a lawyer, I could not love this line more. I think on some level Susan knows that she's being unreasonable, but believes that the ends justify the means. She says to Alicia - "we women of decision" - meaning she is in charge of her life. She is - like the line above – convinced of her own merit, therefore her decisions must be correct, even if the rationale is somewhat unreasonable.

I’m glad Keely mentioned the “women of decision” line because this first scene is also one of my favorite bits in the movie

Lady Susan is certainly one of the meatier female lead roles I've seen in awhile. Kate Beckinsale must've had an absolute blast playing that part, which she does flawlessly. My only criticism, from a story standpoint, is that Lady Susan's character doesn't seem to evolve in any material way as a result of her journey. She begins the story as a manipulative egocentric, and alas she ends as she starts, with perhaps just a smidgen more affection for her daughter. She's a wonderfully fun character to watch but she learns virtually nothing, which is a bit unusual. Normally I would say this was unsatisfying, but in this case I love Lady Susan so much that I don't really want to see her change. ;) Did you feel this way at all?

KRIS: First, I totally agree with your point about her conviction and self-regard -- and even when she wrongs people on an individual level, it’s hard to fault her for the orientation toward life she’s chosen in the context of her society. (Totally different genre, but I also feel this way about Gone Girl.)

I think it’s true that she doesn’t have much of an arc

But I agree, she’s so fun to watch and Beckinsale just kills it, I’m not sure I’d want to see a different Susan. Definitely not one with softer edges.

I’m trying to pinpoint the act breaks to see if there’s more of an emotional arc that I’m missing, but I think the breaks are the arrivals of new characters who complicate Susan’s scheming

They’re consequences of her actions, but they’re consequences of actions that happen in “zero act” so they don’t have the same cause-and-effect feel that you’d “traditionally” want to see in a straightforward feature

(I thiiiink I’d say the break into two is when James arrives, but could see a case for Frederica. The break into three is triggered by Lucy Manwaring, yeah?)

KEELY: I felt like the first act break was the arrival of Federica (which Susan clearly doesn't want, and complicates Susan's designs on Reginald), but agree that Lucy Manwaring was the second act break. The only small arc that I can see for Lady Susan is a growing affection for her daughter. It's small (if it even exists) - we only see just a hint of it in her final carriage ride with Alicia.  Otherwise she seems to hold true to her convictions and her world view from beginning to end, no?

KRIS: I think that’s right. There’s a suggestion that her feelings about Frederica haven’t changed much when she tricks Catherine and Charles into thinking that moving Frederica back to Churchill is something she doesn’t want, but I think the best hints that their relationship has improved are in Frederica’s attitude toward the end

Although part of that is probably just relief about not having to marry James, and I guess it’s still not clear whether Frederica understands all the layers of Susan’s scheming

I did laugh out loud at the line “I’m not so self-indulgent as to want to wallow in the companionship of a child”

“even her tendency to extreme quiet I’ve grown to find rather soothing” was another favorite -- deeply honest in what I read as an otherwise manipulative conversation, and funny for how to Susan it’s a throwaway observation that she doesn’t realize says a lot about their relationship or her parenting

KEELY: Could there be an argument that her growth is that she becomes more "selfish"? Instead of trying to save Frederica's future by passing her off on Sir James, she takes Alicia's advice to be more "selfish" and takes Sir James for herself. This plays nicely into the tongue in cheek- ness of the film – the idea that Lady Susan has actually been incredibly unselfish for the entire film and only becomes selfish in the end when she decides to take Sir James as her own. Sounds like an argument Lady Susan herself would make. ;-)

KRIS: Oh I LOVE that

She does SO MUCH damage when she’s trying to do the best thing she knows how for Frederica, and everything just clicks together when she takes Alicia’s advice

That’s great

KEELY: It seems poetic.

KRIS: And it’s also illuminating of the Manwaring relationship, like you said -- she’s doing actually a very unpragmatic thing by holding out for a union with this guy she’s deeply in lust and love with

KEELY: I wish I lived in LA. This would be so much fun over wine.

KRIS: Yes, please reach out next time you visit, if you have time! I’m happy to stay on here as long as you like, but I also don’t want to keep you too long if your schedule for the rest of the day is tight. The last big thing I really want to say is that I enjoy how a lot of the first act involves learning about Susan through how other people talk about her when she’s not around. That’s a device I tend to like a lot, but I’m not yet very good at it myself -- it’s easy to make it too transparently expositional, but it works really well here, maybe because it’s being translated from an epistolary novella.

KEELY: I liked that too – in particular, the introductory scene between Lord and Lady Vernon. It efficiently and effectively demonstrates the difference between how men and women view Lady Susan, which is the heart of the conflict in the story.

KRIS: Right, there’s a little bit of a “catfight, maybe?” vibe that could be troubling in other contexts, but here part of the lesson -- though the text of the movie is never pedantic about this -- is that Susan is sometimes harmful to other women because patriarchy has sort of weaponized her talents. And because the movie loves Susan as much as we do, it doesn’t go into like “Madonna-Whore complex” territory.

And it also never makes, say, Catherine the butt of a joke. I liked that I could empathize with her even as I rooted for Susan to pull out a win somehow.

KEELY: I think, overall, it illuminates the superior intellect of the women too. In other words, the women are able to see through her deceit and manipulation whereas the men are not. 

KRIS: Yeah!

The first scene with Catherine and Charles does a lot of work in hindsight. Catherine is absolutely in the right about the facts, but Charles also isn’t wrong in a broader sense about how women in Susan’s position are treated.

Reginald and Catherine’s father is interesting in this context -- he knows enough to think of Susan as dangerous, but isn’t smart enough to outmaneuver her and is maybe the closest thing the movie has to an unpleasant personality so our sympathies stay with Susan

KEELY: Agree. I particularly like Catherine as well, even though she points out Lady Susan's faults. I think it's because the film doesn't fall into the trap of making women dislike other women on the basis that they're attractive to other men. That's catty. Here, the women don't like her because she's manipulative (or a husband stealer). Which is fair. But we don't fault Lady Susan for her manipulation because what other choice does she have in her world? 

The film walks a tightrope here, but comes out well-balanced I think. 

KRIS: Yeah, the whole thing is such a fun and smart and delicate balancing act

Do you have any other overarching thoughts, or favorite moments/lines?

KEELY: I think it's a good illustration of how important comedy is to the success of this genre right now. I'm feeling inspired!! 

KRIS: Keely, thanks so much for joining me to talk about this. And for being patient with the long waits between my replies!

Hopefully we’ll figure out a time to talk about Home Again with Kelly soon

KEELY: Thank you, Kris!! Your thoughts and insights are illuminating - it's been a lot of fun!! 

And, YES, Home Again and Nancy Meyers are my jam. I'll make myself free!!

(Hope you’re reading, Kelly.)

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