Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop, is celebrated for its literary heritage and cultural influence. Even its location is cool.
Founded in 1951 by the late George Whitman, the store sits on the Left Bank of the Seine, opposite Notre Dame Cathedral, a refuge and meeting point for generations of writers, poets and thinkers.
It’s not just a bookseller but a thriving literary space, offering free lodging to aspiring writers – known as Tumbleweeds – in exchange for help around the store. One such weed is Laura Piani, the French writer-director of the new film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, who has chronicled Whitman’s handover to his daughter, Sylvia. From the get-go it was an adventure.
“It all started in a bathroom of a bar in Rome, where I was studying cinema and literature,” Piani says. “I met a depressed Canadian guy, an artist who became one of my closest friends, and who was staying in Shakespeare and Company for many months, between his travels.
Moving from Dublin to rural Ireland: ‘Every time we went away we loved all the green around us. Then we thought, let’s just go do it’
John Simpson: ‘It’s been great to watch how Ireland went from a pretty backward country to a real powerhouse in Europe’
Five of the best family friendly hiking trails around Ireland: From easy to demanding
“When I came back from Rome I went there. I met Sylvia and George Whitman. I became friends with her. She was my age. And, like anybody who ever met George, I was completely infatuated with him, because he was so clever.”
Piani worked at Shakespeare and Company while studying screenwriting at the European Conservatory of Audiovisual Writing. She was in the inaugural cohort of the showrunner course at La Fémis, France’s premiere film school, and has subsequently written for both television and cinema, including the crime show Spiral and the pre-Tár woman-conductor drama Philharmonia. Her writing continues to engage with literature and with those old bohemian friends.
“Many years after that first meeting, when I was doing my PhD, I came back to work in the bookshop,” she says. “I was doing the night shift. It was a very interesting crowd. The people who worked there were all aspiring writers, actors and musicians. I was trying to become a scriptwriter. We were talking about poetry and literature. We were all dreamers.”
At Shakespeare and Company (whose name Whitman took from the bookshop opened nearby, in 1919, by Sylvia Beach, first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses) Piani learned how, after asking one or two questions, to identify the book that might just change a customer’s life. It’s a skill she uses to craft her fictional characters and find their back stories. The bookstore and its artistic community feature prominently in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, the title of which acknowledges one of Piani’s great passions.
“I discovered Jane when I was a teenager,” she says. “She’s not something that you learn at school in France. She’s famous, but not as famous as in the anglophone countries. But I was a very, very active reader, and I wanted to read love stories. I remember looking for kisses and sex scenes.
“When I was in my 20s, at Shakespeare and Company, I was confident enough to reread Jane Austen in English, and read the ones that I didn’t read when I was a teenager. That’s when I got the humour, the tenderness and the political questions that she was raising. Because women had to get married to survive, but it was in their hands. Suddenly, they were allowed to choose.”
Piani’s film puts a clever spin on the Austen-influenced romcom. It’s a much-needed revival for a genre that, despite having yielded It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday and When Harry Met Sally, has been largely discarded by Hollywood and disparaged by others.
“I think that says a lot about them,” the film-maker says. “I don’t know how things are in Ireland, but in France right now, even more than love stories, we need stories of consolation.
“I do feel there is a common and shared joy in the romcom. A big reason for me to make the film was for friends who are stuck watching the same romcoms from the 1990s. You don’t need to be sophisticated when you start to do something as long as it comes from a very sincere and organic place. I wanted to give something to the people I love.”
Leaving aside the 17 adaptations (and counting) of Pride and Prejudice since 1938, there is a strong argument for positioning Austen as the godmother of the modern romcom. Bridget Jones’s Diary, from 2001, leant into Colin Firth’s post-Austen celebrity; Clueless seamlessly relocated Emma to 1990s Beverly Hills; Fire Island, from 2022, repopulates Pride and Prejudice with gay men; and Austenland, from 2013, adapts a classic romantic misunderstanding to a Regency theme-park setting. Austen is, as Piani notes, a universally acknowledged cultural force.
“I’ve found Jane Austen societies everywhere, in every single country from Greece to Spain to Italy,” the writer-director says. “It gives me a big hope for humanity, because these people come together and talk about literature and poetry everywhere. She belongs to everyone. She’s timeless. And the world needs romance that is not marketed product for streaming platforms.”
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life follows Agathe (Camille Rutherford), a clumsy yet endearing Parisian bookseller at Shakespeare and Company. Despite her passion for literature and her dreams of becoming a writer, Agathe is blocked, both creatively and romantically. Her best friend, Félix (Pablo Pauly), secretly submits her work to the Jane Austen Writers’ Residency in England, leading to her unexpected acceptance.
At the retreat Agathe encounters the preoccupied Oliver (Charlie Anson), a brooding Austen descendant, igniting a complex romantic triangle between him – a great-great-great-nephew of the writer – and her chum Félix. Who will Agathe blame for this predicament and all its complications?
“When you try to approach a romcom after the masterpieces that were made already, you need to think about what you can bring on the table – something a little bit new without being pretentious,” Piani says.
“A love triangle has worked since the beginning of dramatology. I wanted to have dance as a turning point and all these things that consciously we wait for. But I did not want to do a film about a woman who is saved by a man. I believe in love, but not that. I wanted her to have this goal of becoming a writer. I allowed myself to play with the cultural differences between France and England without being too obvious.”
The rival suitors are notably not as unsuitable as many of Austen’s failed gentlemen callers. Félix is a flirt, but he’s not a cad like George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. Neither character is as pretentious as the Emma reject Mr Elton or as overbearing as the other Emma reject, Mr Knightley.
“I didn’t want men who were seducers,” Piani says. “I wanted the audience to love both suitors. Félix sincerely loves women. I took my cues from Austen. Because Mr Darcy is the opposite of an alpha or toxic male. I tried to be meta as much as I could. The fact that Jane Austen was sharing her bed with her sister when she died moved me a lot. So I brought a sister into the story.”
Austen fans will (gleefully) welcome the parallels between Rutherford’s lovelorn Agathe and Anne Elliot, the protagonist of Persuasion. Just as the stoic Anne aches for Captain Wentworth, whom she once rejected, Agathe, too, is in a self-imposed limbo. Unsurprisingly, Anne is also the Austen character whom Piani feels closest to.
“The one that moved me the most was Persuasion,” she says. “I think it’s because it’s darker. She’s older and she thinks that life is over for her. She’s, what, 27? And she feels like she missed the train. I cannot even remember how many times I heard that in the mouth of a woman. The feeling of limitation and of being overdue, Jane Austen was writing about this very modern idea 300 years ago.”
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life was snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics at Toronto International Film Festival last year, and has opened in the United States to rave reviews.
“When I made the film I thought, Okay, maybe the audience for our film will be women,” Piani says. “But not at all. There are young men and older men. Everyone. I’ve been hugged by so many people saying the same thing: ‘Thank you for making me smile and cry.’ That’s the most special part of this for me.”
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is in cinemas from Friday, June 13th
