We, the Jane Austen aficionados, are suckers for everything and anything under the sun that’s remotely related to her and her world. That’s because we are so drawn to her unique style of fiction, romance, and social commentary, we take any allusion to her influence as a hint to what to expect when we start watching a movie or reading a book. And when movies have titles with her name in them, like The Jane Austen Book Club, Austenland, and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, we’re going to watch them.
Out of the three mentioned above, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is the clumsiest and most amateurish. The most disappointing thing about it is that, in its most important aspects, it feels like it is the underdeveloped twin of Austenland, as both are loose modern reinterpretations of Pride and Prejudice and follow a devoted Jane Austen fan on her journey to find love in a remote place while dealing with love triangles and peculiar characters.
I have a thing for music and dance scenes in movies that are not musicals, so I took it as a good sign when the movie started with the camera following Agathe, our main character, dancing around one of the most famous bookshops in the world, Shakespeare and Company in Paris. At the time, I wouldn’t have thought that her stiff and awkward dancing—like that of someone who has only ever danced at social events and is now trying it alone for the first time, testing whether it might be a way to relieve stress or simply enjoy herself—would foreshadow how Agathe and the rest of the movie will end up being like.
While the movie presents itself as a quirky, if somewhat unoriginal, romantic comedy, both the comedy and the romance felt forced and unnatural. It was almost like they did not belong with each other or with the rest of the movie. This lack of coordination and blending in made watching Jane Austen Wrecked My Life an extremely uncomfortable experience. And for a romantic comedy to have any appeal, even if they lack admirable qualities, the protagonist has to be at least likable. For this kind of movie to work, the audience must care that the characters get together and live happily ever after. In Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, I did not care who Agathe ended up with. Her stiff, awkward personality and visual presentation undermined every romantic and comedic scene she appeared in. The moments that revealed glimpses of entitled and misplaced pretentiousness did her character no favors, either.
Except for some truly breathtaking scenery, everything in this movie seems out of place. It feels as though every element—the casting, the writing, the editing—was thrown together in a hurry, without much regard for what the final product would look like. With its choppy and implausible dialogue, plot threads that appear out of nowhere only to be abandoned shortly afterward, and characters who lack chemistry with one another, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is decidedly inferior to Austenland. And I have never thought of myself saying this, but there are too many dancing scenes in this movie. By the end, I found myself wishing I had simply rewatched Austenland instead.
