I admit my heart sank a little – only a little, mind you – when I first heard that Whit Stillman was making a Jane Austen adaptation. A singularly literate comic voice in American cinema, he doesn’t work often enough as it is: we can ill afford to donate his gifts to someone else’s comedy of manners, right? Happily, I was wrong; in Love & Friendship (Lionsgate, U), Austen’s brisk sense and Stillman’s wily sensibility make for about as perfect an arranged marriage as you could hope for.
A quick, zesty take on Austen’s novella Lady Susan that adores and embellishes her language with equal care, Stillman’s film bridges the social and romantic politics of her era with ours. Beneath its whipped-cream quippery, it shows a very real and ruthless understanding of why we pursue relationships – for a multitude of reasons quite apart from love, friendship or even a compromise of the two. Kate Beckinsale, an actress too few film-makers have thought to challenge over the years, turns out to be an optimum fit for Austen – all surface serenity masking Stanley-knife severity. But it’s Tom Bennett, so inspired and endearing as the most gormless of Austen suitors, who is the revelation here, finding exquisite possibilities for physical comedy amid all those impeccable words. Stillman, for his part, lets no opportunity for a laugh, however rueful, slip. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility remains the most gracious of Austens on film, but it’s no longer the funniest.
It’s a good week for film comedy, as it happens. The jokes in Shane Black’s underworld odd-couple comedy The Nice Guys (Icon, 15) are certainly broader and bro-ier than those cultivated by Stillman, but they land just as deliciously. Black has always managed a surprising balance of brawny genre muscle with fleet comic footwork, and while this throwback effort – stewed in 1970s sweat the colour of tea – is a straighter, less subversive party than 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, he still has considerable fun at the expense of Hollywood’s most po-faced masculine archetypes.
The character names are your first clue. Russell Crowe is brutish enforcer Jackson Healy, Ryan Gosling is louche private eye Holland March. As they haphazardly join forces on a missing persons case in disco-era LA, their macho puffery is about as formidable as Jessica Fletcher in an armoured vest, which is of course half the fun. Crowe and Gosling have a tipsy, hangdog chemistry that keeps Black’s most clever-clogs writing from falling into snark, but that’s rarely a risk. There’s a genuine love here for the neo-noir tropes that the film so breezily inverts and it’s never smarmy when it can be funny instead.
We stop the laugh riot abruptly in its tracks, however, for Fire at Sea (Curzon Artificial Eye, 12), Gianfranco Rosi’s subtly shattering observational documentary on Europe’s migrant crisis, which examines life on both sides of the border with all the level-headed humanity we need in this ugly age of Skittles analogies. Concentrating its focus on the tiny Sicilian isle of Lampedusa, a key passage point for many North Africans desperate for a better life, Rosi’s patient camera absorbs both the everyday and more extreme frailties of resident and refugee communities, resisting both patronising parallels and sanctimonious assertions of difference. It’s graceful but upsetting viewing, perhaps best viewed with the relatively hopeful chaser of Netflix’s 40-minute original The White Helmets, in which documentarian Orlando von Einsiedel (recently Oscar-nominated for Virunga) ventures into Aleppo to study the work of the Syrian Civil Defence, a volunteer group charged with retrieving human life from the rubble. Gripping and more considered than sentimental, it offers an unfamiliar perspective on a crisis usually documented in entirely despairing terms.
Finally, the pick of this week’s rereleases come with an autumnal shiver. Jacques Tourneur’s slinky, shape-shifting 1942 horror film Cat People (Criterion, PG) has been given typically immaculate Criterion Collection treatment. With a 2K restoration this lush, the knife edge between B-movie and capital-A art film has never been sharper.
There’s a further treasure in Early Murnau: Five Films 1921-1925 (Eureka, PG), a fascinating, deep-cut compilation of the German expressionist’s less celebrated silent work, from class-conscious murder mystery The Haunted Castle to smoky psychological reverie Phantom, a glorious apparition thought lost until a decade ago.
