They agree to let Lady Susan stay with them even though they are aware of her flirty, gold-digging history. A recent widow and completely broke, she makes her way to the estate of her brother-in-law Charles (Justin Edwards) and his wife Catherine (Emma Greenwell). Kate Beckinsale plays the conniving, opportunistic Lady Susan. That last description is especially impressive since the film perfectly fits within its late 18th century aristocratic setting. “Love & Friendship” is very much a Stillman picture – intelligent, tightly focused, and refreshingly modern. It’s the fifth film from writer and director Whit Stillman and his first since 2011’s fabulous oddball campus comedy “Damsels in Distress”. It’s “Love & Friendship”, a whip-smart period comedy named after an early Austen story but actually based her epistolary novel “Lady Susan”. The latest Austen film treatment may be the cleverest and best executed of the bunch. To venture even further into absurdity just this year we had “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. You could also include the wide range of movies that found their inspiration in Austen’s work – movies ranging from “Bridget Jones’s Diary” to the wackier “Clueless”. Obviously you have the gushy, sudsy dramas such as “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice” which together have been adapted nearly twenty times in film and television. You could almost say Jane Austen adaptations make up their own small, intimate movie genre.
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