LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
Whit Stillman brings a caustic drollness to his adaptation of Jane Austen's posthumously published novella Lady Susan about the recently widowed titular character (Kate Beckinsale), whose effect on men is both the source of her strength and the reason at least one of her compatriots views her as disagreeably devious. Stillman's comedy of manners focuses on Lady Susan's visit to the estate of close acquaintances, where she meets—and strikes up a troublesome-to-others relationship with—a handsome bachelor (Xavier Samuel), all while keeping company with her Connecticut-born best friend (Chloe Sevigny) and dealing with the unexpected arrival of her daughter (Morfydd Clark). The complications that spring forth from this drawing-room scenario soon prove knotty, and Stillman handles his various players' intersecting desires and machinations with a light, breezy touch. Beckinsale has never been more subtly charming as the cunning object of everyone's affection (or, at least, attention), and Tom Bennett's doltish Sir James Martin—a man whom Lady Susan intends to have marry her daughter—is arguably the year's most hilariously absurd character.
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