11/09/2024 - Laura Piani’s first feature film is a sincere and charm-filled romantic comedy about the misadventures of a woman trying to reconcile body and mind

"Who are you waiting for? Mark Darcy?” – “I’m just not living in the right century, that’s all". When thirty-year-old Parisian bookseller Agathe - the highly endearing protagonist of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life by French director Laura Piani (unveiled in a world premiere within the 49^th Toronto Film Festival’s Centrepiece section) - is asked which book she’d recommend to get inside the world of the renowned British novelist gracing the film’s title, she suggests Persuasion and the character "of a spinster who’s withered because she hasn’t been given enough water and has conscientiously missed out on life".

This is no coincidental choice, because it holds up a mirror to Agathe (Camille Rutherford), who refuses "uberised sex", who hasn’t slept with anyone for two years, and who prefers to take refuge in the world of literature because "some books become part of our lives, they help us to live, they reveal our true nature to us". But things aren’t quite as simple as all that: petrified by hang-ups and doubts, Agathe - who’s urged by her loved ones to "explore something different" - dreams of loving and being loved, and of the body of a naked man emerging in her life. She projects this ideal into the beginning of a novel written in English. Wholly unintentionally, at the instigation of her colleague and old friend Félix (Pablo Pauly), who seizes this opportunity to declare his love for her, she finds herself selected for a two-week-long writing residency in England. It’s a trip which serves up some tasty surprises on all fronts, notably the very British Oliver (Charlie Anson) who’s a distant descendent of Jane Austen and on whose shoes Agathe vomits after she first disembarks from the ferry…

Often funny, aiming for simplicity, and openly good-natured, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is an unpretentious yet well-executed French variation on the Working Title classics (such as Notting Hill), boasting Woody-Allen-style comic content. Written by the director, the screenplay skilfully treads the line of romantic comedy while hitting the target on various empathy-inducing subjects (emotional loneliness, the need to break free from the chains of the past and to accept change, the fact that great joy and great sadness are both essential to discovering oneself, the different sides and the evolution of feminism, artistic imposter syndrome, etc.). With this first feature film, Laura Piani fully demonstrates that a good story is "the only remedy against the disorder of thoughts and feelings", and that, ultimately, if it’s funny it’s even better.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life was produced by Les Films du Veyrier and Sciapode, in co-production with Pictanovo, and with international sales steered by The Bureau Sales. The film has also just been bought by Sony Pictures Classics for North America, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as well as for airlines all over the world.

(Translated from French)