Whit stillman love and friendship book6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() While Love & Friendship is set in another era, it mirrors the themes of his other films: rules, politesse and a certain gentleness that abhors vulgarity. After a 13-year hiatus, Stillman returned to his formalist form with Damsels in Distress (2013), in which a group of women try to rescue their fellow female college classmates from the tyranny of boorish bro culture (the film is loosely based on Stillman’s own time at Harvard). It was The Last Days of Disco (1998) that cemented his comic, mannered approach to storytelling, as two editors in New York (played by Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny) chase love in the club. ![]() Since Stillman’s beloved debut, Metropolitan, he has relished stories of upper class “struggles:” in the 1990 film, a group of debutantes find their hermetically sealed society disrupted by a new arrival in Barcelona (1994), an uptight Midwest boy’s ways are disrupted by his free-loving cousin. An adaptation of one of Jane Austen’s lesser known works, the novella Lady Susan, here Stillman has found his ideal match in the 18th century novelist: both revel in the gentle mockery of bourgeois social norms through the comedy of manners. “My daughter has proved to be cunning and manipulative-I couldn’t be more proud.” This loving adulation is spoken by Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) near the end of Whit Stillman’s fifth film, Love & Friendship, which chronicles the conniving successes of a widowed woman set on finding the perfect match for herself and her daughter.
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