Jane Austen is considered one of the best writers of her generation. She inspired women to be more independent and fight for their rights in a society that didn’t even let them vote or work a full-time job. She also wrote about love and not settling for the first man who came along that treated a woman nicely.  Pride and Prejudice,  Sense and Sensibility and Emma are three of her well-known novels , but she wrote more than sixty in her career. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is based on the book Jane Austen Ruined My Life, by Beth Pattillo, a story about a woman who uses the ideas and principles in Jane Austen’s, books and tries to apply them in her own life.

Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) is a lonely bookstore merchant who lives in Paris, France. In the pres÷nt day. She struggles with her love life and lives a bit of a solitude lifestyle.  She falls back on the novels of her favorite author, Jane Autsen, for advice on love. When she gets an invitation to a writers conservatory to practice writing the way Jane Austen would write, she takes it as an opportunity to explore her own personality and open up. She meets a man while there, Oliver (Charlie Anson), who says he’s the great great grandson of Jane Austen.  With the help from a close male friend, Felix (Pablo Pauly), she starts to become closer to this man. The problem is that she will let her own insecurities get in the way of her one true love.

As probably noticeable by the title, this film is a romantic film with some comedic elements tied into it. With it also being a French film, there are subtitles, and sometimes subtitles can get lost in translation. The mix of English and French doesn’t hurt the story, but the slow pacing and monotony of the story does hurt the story and film therein. I desperately wanted to enjoy this movie because I like European based rom come and period pieces films. This one was so boring it nearly put me to sleep. The dialogue, whether it was in English or French subtitles, was not very exciting or fast-paced, like the books of Jane Austen were. Those books were adapted into mostly very good movies. This one doesn’t come close to those in the least.

Laura Paina, the writer/director of this film, obviously cared about the works of Jane Austen when she wrote this story. It may, in fact, have been autobiographical. Who knows?  She didn’t capture much of what made the Jane Austen novels popular in their day.  Faced paced quick-witted dialogue and verbiage. Or characters that were intriguing.  The main pair of characters in the love story are dull and not interesting at all. The best character of the bunch was the friend of the main character. Even the members of the writers’ conservatory weren’t very fascinating. I truly didn’t care about any of them. That was sad because I genuinely wanted to root for this woman and her romantic well-being. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough interest in her to be that invested in her at all.

The film’s setting in Paris and the English countryside and around an old English manor were ! Fantastic setting for this story. The cinematography was quite beautiful, but the rest of the movie didn’t live up to the beautiful look of it. Also, to that effect, the music was nice and set a tone with all the classical strings and flutes and clarinets so forth. The music set me up for something good, and what I got was far from good regarding the story and character development.  It’s hard to praise the technical aspects of the movie when the meat and potatoes aren’t very well cooked. I wished everything would have been much more stimulating. 

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is an example of a writer/director trying to capture a certain vibe of Jane Austen novels, but instead creates a story and characters that are quite dull and boring. The cast is mostly fine, but they are stuck in a film that drags them down to the mud. The technical aspects regarding the cinematography and music are quite good, but they overshadow what is not worthy of this work. With the title having Jane Austen in it, I thought I was going to get something akin to the films adapted from her great works. Instead, I got something that literally almost put me to sleep because of how slow and monotonous it is. Maybe women would still like it, but it wasn’t for me.  That’s unfortunate because I did want to like it.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen