Love & Friendship

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With the current rating at seven which I have seen before the film, I thought that the film would be a good one, but I was wrong. This is not a good film ( for me). Although I do like films with similar settings and I do liked the films which seems to be more of a theatre plays than actual films, this one was ... rather boring, not really entertaining, not funny at all ( as the film poster and some critics said), quite rushed ( if I may say) and you do not really get to understand the motives behind some of the characters moves. And that rococco /baroque music was not really fitting in my opinion. As for the actors/acting... as I mentioned, the film is close to a theatre play, so, yes, the actors were kinda good for a piece of theatre but for the film... not so sure. I would only recommend to watch this if you really really do not have anything else to watch. It is not entirely boring and uninteresting, but it is far from an entertaining piece. My rating is four ( though it may deserves a star more).

The funniest character in the film is James Martin. He steals every scene he's in and each time he was on the screen I couldn't stop laughing. Unfortunately, he isn't in a lot of the film, and the rest of the movie's humor comes in the form of pithy one liners at the end of every scene. Sometimes I'd chuckle at those, but that'd be about it. There aren't any weak links in the cast, they all do a great job with what they're given, but I wish they were given something better. The movie moves at an incredibly slow pace, and with not a lot ever going on, it often feels like I'm being read a Jane Austen novel rather than watching a movie adaptation. The movie isn't "bad" by any means but there's so little going for it that I would consider noteworthy I can't really find myself ever wanting to sit through Love & Friendship again. Maybe if you absolutely LOVE period dramas from a design standpoint or are a huge Jane Austen fan, you'll get more out of this movie than I did, but otherwise there isn't much here.

Perhaps this is a movie that only Jane Austen fans can love. I like Jane Austen but I don't like this movie. The non-acting aspects of the movie were superb, and the acting overall was fine. My problems with the movie is the story itself and the director's lack of imagination with it. The movie reflects that, as an early work of Jane Austen, it was not very sophisticated. The writing and directing did not improve on it. In effect, the movie was built on a series of tedious soliloquies by Lady Susan. The only suspense was provided by not knowing which plot elements were real or Lady Susan's fabricated illusions. After a while I realized that I was giving too much benefit to Lady Susan for fabricating illusions. She was clever but not that clever. Her cunning strategies--and the plot--mostly had a short-term horizon that never extended past the next scene. I want to find the book and read it because I can't believe that it had some of the serious defects that the film showed. Most notably, what has been a friendly relation abruptly transformed to a discussion of marriage. I thought I had missed some bridging aspect of the dialogue but checked with my companions after the movie and they had been mystified too. I have a sense that a bridging scene was left on the editing room floor and no one noticed the abrupt change of pace. The conclusion of the movie came too suddenly. Just was it seemed there would be another act, the house lights came on and the movie was over. I got the sense that Jane Austen ran out of ideas for the story, perhaps got bored with it, and so quickly tied up the loose ends. To restate, the non-acting aspects of the movie were superb, and the acting itself was fine, per se. Perhaps there wasn't much material for a great movie in the original Jane Austen work, but the movie I saw could have been a lot better. I think the directing killed the potential for great acting and killed movie overall.