Venom in Love & Friendship

Lady Susan Vernon’s reputation precedes her, and not in a good way.

Brought to life on the big screen by director Whit Stillman, with Kate Beckinsale in the leading role, Jane Austen’s posthumously published Lady Susan has finally been given the Hollywood adaptation treatment. Adopting the title of an entirely separate piece of Austen’s juvenilia, Love & Friendship attempts to find a home amongst the established Austen adaptation canon by mirroring titles like Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility.

Sharply witty and concerned with a protagonist who might be likened to an older, more maliciously self-serving version of Emma Woodhouse, the novella is epistolary in form, posing a formidable challenge to those wishing to translate it to film, where characters traditionally occupy the same physical space. Herein lies its downfall.

Few real conversations

The film moves at a brisk pace, with short scenes filled with fast dialogue and patched together without much care for aesthetics. Each scene exists solely for the transfer of information between characters, much in the way letters convey information between people, without requiring or benefitting from the physical presence of their writers or recipients. Conversations throughout the film are monologues shooting past each other, suffering no consequence from what has gone before. Never is this more obvious than in the scenes featuring Lady Susan and her friend, Mrs Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny). Maintaining a friendship whose only purpose seems to be the encouragement of Lady Susan as a diabolical manipulator, or, as her friend calls her, a ‘brilliant creature’, conversations centre on a celebration of Lady Susan’s plotting and a mutual despising of Mrs Johnson’s ‘respectable but dull’ disapproving husband, played by Stephen Fry.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of sociology and published author of works examining the differences in written communication versus real life conversation, recently stated in a lecture that it is in our ‘faltering, stuttering, body language and tone’ that we really come to know each other in conversation. According to this theory, the only real conversation that occurs is one whose purpose is comedy, as Sir James Martin is introduced and blunders his way through meeting Lady Susan’s sister-in-law for the first time. His voice is too loud, he repeats himself, rambles at length about an irrelevant anecdote. That’s far more like the experiences I daily have in conversing with people, rather than Lady Susan’s flawlessly delivered lines of acerbic wit.

Controlling opportunism

Early on in the film Lady Susan declares to her maid (who does not get paid, due to the ‘element of friendship between them’), that she wouldn’t ‘ever want to think in opportunistic terms’. It soon becomes apparent that these are, in fact, the only terms in which she is capable of thinking, speaking and behaving. Like pawns in a game of chess, she attempts to control those around her with deceit, oppression and manipulation. The saddest manifestation of this is in her mothering of her daughter Frederica Vernon, whom she tells ‘we do not live, we visit’, in order to persuade her to marry the foolish James Martin and thereby secure financial security for her mother. Lady Susan shows no kindness or consideration for her daughter, and attempts to use her just as she uses others in her circle. This contrasts the kind gentleness of Sir Reginald (James Fleet) and Lady DeCourcy (Jemma Redgrave), who welcome Frederica, give her a home and look to her best interests.

When Lady Susan’s affair is irrevocably revealed, her sister-in law says of her manipulation of the situation: ‘she’s a genius – like the serpent in Adam and Eve’s garden.’ Lady Susan’s own reaction is to say that ‘facts are horrid things’ and pays them no reverence. When Reginald DeCourcy Junior marries Frederica Vernon, he praises her for her ‘virtue, the charm that most adorns the fair’, in contrast to her mother, under whose beguile he had formerly been blindly deceived for so many months, and whose lack of virtue seems to be of no consequence in a society restricted by propriety and good manners.

No deep relationships

It is this self-serving manipulation which should repel all those around her, but her circle are bound by decorum to stand by her. The rapid repartee of the dialogue struggles to move believably from the pages of letters into real life conversations, and as such strays from juvenile wit (Austen was 17 when she wrote the novella) to become a brutal treading down of others, so as to promote herself. Love & Lady Susan’s, and therefore Friendship’s, abrasiveness results in a superficial, aggravating film with none of the reliable Austen qualities of deep, complex relationships, or the captivating aesthetics of other adaptations, and lacks respect for the different style and values different forms of communication command.