May 26, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Laura Piani
French with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in Paris and in England, the comedy film “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: French introvert Agathe Robinson, a bookstore employee who is a big fan of author Jane Austen, gets unexpectedly accepted into a prestigious writers’ retreat in England, where she struggles with self-doubt and her feelings for her male best friend in Paris and the English literature professor whose parents founded the retreat.
Culture Audience: “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in European romantic movies that are made in the spirit of Jane Austen novels.
When a romance-themed movie has the name Jane Austen in the title, you can probably predict how the movie is going to end. “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is very shallow in some areas, but Camille Rutherford’s magnetic performance carries this uneven comedy. The supporting actors also give entertaining performances, but your interest in watching the entire movie will come largely from whether or not you care about what happens to the protagonist portrayed by Rutherford.
Written and directed by Laura Piani, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is her feature-film directorial debut. The movie had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” was filmed in France and has a very European sensibility when it comes to comedy. The pace is slower than a typical American romantic comedy. And the emphasis is on comedy found in situations rather than filling the movie with jokes and hilarious people.
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” begins by showing protagonist Agathe Robinson (played by Rutherford) at one of the few places where she feels at home and at ease: a Shakespeare & Company bookstore where she works in Paris. Agathe, who is in her mid-to-late-20s, is a sales clerk who has a passion for the work of 1800s British novelist Jane Austen (“Sense and Sensibility” is Agathe’s favorite Austen book) and generally has a preference for romance novels.
As shown in the movie’s opening scene, when Agathe is alone in the bookstore (such as when the store is closed to customers), she feels like a lighthearted kid in a playground. There’s a mirror in the store that has become a message board where customers have placed hand-written Post-It notes to strangers they’ve seen in the store and want to meet in person but were too shy to approach in the store. Agathe likes to read these notes, which remind her that she’s not the only lonely heart looking for love.
In her personal life, Agathe is a bachelorette who has self-esteem issues. She’s an introvert who has become pessimistic about finding true love. She dislikes the modern dating scene and would rather have a traditional courtship instead of a bunch of casual boyfriends. Agathe, who likes to travel by bicycle, wonders to herself if she was born in the wrong century.
Would she have been happier in Jane Austen’s era, when gender roles for dating and marriage were more defined but also much stricter? It’s later revealed that Agathe has been celibate for the past two years, but she doesn’t consider herself to be an uptight prude. She considers herself to be very selective.
Agathe is an aspiring writer who has yet to finish her first novel. She’s insecure about her skills as a writer. In a creative writing class that Agathe takes in her spare time, the teacher gives her criticism for writing generic short stories. This criticism affects Agathe and makes her doubt if she’s got the talent to be a professional writer.
Agathe lives a quiet and simple life in an apartment with her older sister Mona (played by Alice Butaud), who is a single mother to a 6-year-old boy named Tom (played by Roman Angel), who is adorable and friendly. Tom has noticed that Agathe hasn’t been dating anyone because he says remarks early one morning that there’s a man in Mona’s bed, but Agathe hasn’t had a man in her bed in a long time. Mona’s attitude toward dating is the opposite of Agathe’s, but the two sisters respect each other’s choices and don’t meddle or lecture each other about their love lives.
An early scene in the movie shows that Mona is somewhat dismissive of a man named Gabriel (played by Pierre-François Garel), who’s spent the night with Mona and who’s awkwardly hanging around the next morning to have breakfast with the family. Mona doesn’t care to remember Gabriel’s name and keeps calling him Raphaël, even after he politely corrects her. Mona treats Gabriel as a one-night stand she doesn’t want to see anymore, but Gabriel can’t take the hint and acts like he hopes that he and Mona will continue to see each other. Gabriel is never seen again in the movie.
Mona’s best friend (and apparently, her only friend) is Félix (played by Pablo Pauly), who is a sales clerk that the same Shakespeare & Co. bookstore where Agathe works. Félix is a carefree bachelor who openly dates many women and tells his lovers that he doesn’t want a commitment with any of them. He’s not particularly good-looking, but he has a confident and flirtatious way about him that some women find attractive. Félix is a heartbreaker, but he’s not intentionally cruel about it.
Félix flirts with Agathe too, but she refuses to let their relationship be anything other than a close platonic friendship. Agathe has let it be known to Félix that she doesn’t want to be one of his many sexual conquests. He accepts this decision, but he still flirts with her in the hope that Agathe might change her mind.
Félix thinks Agathe is a more talented writer than Agathe thinks she is. He secretly submitted her work to a prestigious writers’ retreat called the Jane Austen Residency, which selects less than five writers and meets for two weeks at a mansion in England. It’s an all-expenses-paid-trip for those chosen for this retreat. Agathe gets accepted into the retreat but is appalled and frightened when Félix tells her the news because Agathe doesn’t think she’s good enough to be at this residency.
With just a few days left to go before the retreat begins, Agathe is still having doubts about whether or not to go and is stressed-out about her decision. While having a late-night snack of pasta, Agathe gets a mild scolding from Mona, who tells Agathe not to pass up this opportunity to go to this retreat.
“You’ve put your life on hold since the accident,” Mona tells Agathe. It’s later revealed that a great deal of Agathe’s insecurities and anxieties are from her grief over a car accident that killed their parents about seven years ago. Agatha’s father had a stroke while he was driving the car. Agathe and her mother were in the car, but only Agathe survived because Agathe was in the back seat.
Of course, Agathe decides to go to the retreat. Félix happily sends her off and gives her a romantic kiss before she leaves for the train station. Agathe surprises herself by immediately kissing him in the same way. She starts to wonder if maybe they maybe she could have a “friends with benefits” situation with Félix and if it could lead to true love.
When Agathe arrives in England, some of the romantic comedy clichés behind. She meets her driver—a serious-looking man about 10 years older than Agathe—named Oliver (played by Charlie Anson) and tells him that she gets panic attacks when she’s in cars, but she can handle getting in his car if that’s her only choice. And then, she vomits on Oliver’s shoes.
The car ride to the mansion is fraught with tension. Agathe is impressed when she finds out that Oliver is the son of the retreat’s founders—and he’s the great-great-great-great nephew of Jane Austen. But her admiration turns to dismay when Oliver says he’s not a fan of Jane Austen. Agathe defends Jane Austen by saying how pioneering Austen was for writing female characters as more realistically complex, in an era when most novels about women were written by men portraying women as either saintly or devilish.
Things go from bad to worse when the car breaks down on a deserted road and Oliver doesn’t know how to fix the car. Oliver tells Agathe that he’s only the driver for the retreat because his father lost his driver’s license. As Oliver tries to figure out how to fix the car, Agathe calls Mona on her cell phone and tells Mona in French that she’s stuck in a broken-down car with a rude and arrogant guy who hates Jane Austen. And faster than you can say “Mr. Darcy from ‘Pride and Prejudice’,” Oliver tells Agathe that he can speak and understand French because he had a five-year live-in relationship with a French woman.
During the course of the story, Oliver and Agathe open up to each ther about their lives. He was a literature professor whose French ex-girlfriend was a co-worker who broke his heart because she cheated on him with several people in their literature department. Oliver has been suspended from his professor job because he trashed the faculty break room in anger.
Oliver’s parents—Todd (played by Alan Fairbairn) and Beth (played by Liz Crowther)—are warm and welcoming to their guests. But it soon becomes apparent why Todd lost his driver’s license: He has early on-set dementia that seems to be getting worse. Agathe gets emotional about Todd because she tells him that he reminds her of her father.
Félix has made plans to visit Agathe at the retreat. Agathe and Oliver have a growing attraction to each other, but Agathe doubts she could have a future with Oliver because she has no intention of moving from France to England. Even with this “love triangle” storyline, you know where this story is going to go and which “suitor” is going to win Agathe’s heart.
Along the way, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” has some slapstick comedy that is mildly amusing and a little corny. There are two separate scenes where Agathe encounters two llamas outdoors and gets spit in the face by one of the llamas.
On her first day at the mansion, Agathe settles into her room and gets ready to take a bath or shower. She walks fully naked into a room next door to her bedroom that she assumes is her bathroom. But surprise! The room is actually Oliver’s bedroom and he’s right there to see her walk in naked. An embarrassed Agathe screams and tells a smirking Oliver to keep that side of his door locked.
“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” comes up very short in developing the other characters who are writers at the retreat: Olympia (played by Lola Peploe), Chéryl (played by Annabelle Lengronne) and Sybil (played by Rodrigue Pouvin) have very little revealed about them in the movie. It could be the way of the movie showing that introverted Agathe has a hard time making friends, but that’s not an excuse to prevent these supporting characters from having fully developed personalities.
Olympia is the only one of these three other writers whose personality stands out. She is bossy, pretentious and argumentative. During a group gathering, Olympia berates Agathe by saying that authors’ work must always have a political purpose. Agathe disagrees. Later, Olympia reveals her own persona heartbreak that is supposed to make Olympia more sympathetic.
The only thing that viewers find out about Chéryl is she likes to read people’s fortunes by using cards. As for Sybil, he’s barely in the movie and has a blank personality. (Documentary fans should look for a cameo from documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who appears near the end of the movie as a poet giving a reading of his work.)
Even with the movie’s flaws, Rutherford gives Agathe a relatable humanity that makes this protagonist seem the most realistic character in the film, even if some of the situations around her are sometimes contrived. Agathe is mopey but also cautiously optimistic about finding a soul mate. She’s confident about what she’s most passionate but hesitant about how she goes after things that seem to come easier to other people.
Pauly and Anson do the best with what they’ve been given in the somewhat limited roles of Agathe’s potential love interests Félix and Oliver. “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” strives for romantic wish fulfillment but a lot of the story is about Agathe’s journey to self-confidence, regardless if she ends up with Félix, Oliver or neither. In that regard, “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is a worthy but not spectacular tribute to the classic Austen heroine, who moves forward in life, even at the risk of painful and embarrassing experiences.
Sony Pictures Classics released “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” in select U.S. cinemas on May 23, 2025. The movie was released in France on January 22, 2025.
