There is a mantra posted on the property of Shakespeare & Company, the legendary indie bookshop located on Paris’ Left Bank where first-time feature writer-director Laura Piani once worked. It reads: “Open door, open books, open mind, open heart.” Yet book clerk Agathe (Rutherford, lovely) is resolutely closed off – to new experiences, new travel, new love. Cowed by a past trauma (left undisclosed for much of the film), Agathe’s world is small. There is her work at the bookstore, a platonic but flirty best friend named Félix (Paul), a shared home with her single mom sister, and a writing group where the instructor dismisses her fiction as “cheap romance.” Agathe’s in a rut, and she knows it. So when a surprise invitation to a Jane Austen writing residency in England arrives, Agathe summons all her courage to cross the Channel in search of inspiration.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a romance, though there’s nothing cheap about it. Sure, Piani draws on the broad strokes of genre (romance, and romantic comedy) for her plot and characterization: I spotted ghosts of a Gallic Bridget Jones in Agathe’s haplessness, stuck-in-her-headness, and knack for stumbling into sticky spots. But the predominant vibe is throwback. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life scratched a real Nineties arthouse itch for me, the same era distributor Sony Pictures Classics arrived on the scene.
That was also the rom-com heyday of Hugh Grant, who co-star Charlie Anson lightly recalls. As a fusty Englishman going through his own crisis, Anson channels Grant’s slightly sad-sack headwinds of his Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill era, with a strong whiff of Sam the Eagle’s sternness mixed in. Anson and Rutherford have a nicely combative chemistry, though it must be said, some of the English-language speakers in the supporting cast sound a little stilted. Whether that’s on the performances or on a script written by a non-native English speaker, I couldn’t say. (Also on the subject of the cast: Keep your eyes open for a late-in-film cameo by documentary legend Frederick Wiseman in his second arthouse pop-up this year following voice work in the baseball indie Eephus.)
Modestly scoped, sometimes sweetly dopey, and sincerely moving, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a charmer. I watched the whole dang thing with a smile, and then painted my nails a very French red in pursuit of Agathe’s perfect manicure. Rom-coms are nothing if not aspirational, non?
This article appears in June 20 • 2025.
