Having left one house, she and her friend, or rather, reluctantly unpaid attendant Mrs. She’s beautiful, cunning, and worldly-wise, and passes from house to house, staying with a succession of friends and relations, moving on when things heat up-which they do, for she is “the most accomplished flirt in all England,” notorious for her “extravagance and dissipation.” “We don’t live, we visit,” she at one point tells her daughter, her elegant rootlessness evocative of those high-society flibbertigibbets grifting off wealthy acquaintances in Hollywood comedies of the ’30s. The abrupt departure is that of the widowed Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), who is perhaps not mad, but is certainly bad and dangerous to know. Stillman’s film begins with the sudden departure of a coach from a stately home, and a flurry of images and captions presenting its characters in heightened self-conscious fashion: each is identified in a portrait-like shot with a framing “vignette” blur, with captions identifying them more than a touch whimsically: “Lord Manwaring-a divinely attractive man” “Sir James Martin-a bit of a ‘rattle.’” It’s based on Lady Susan, an early novel of Austen’s, written in epistolary form confusingly, it also takes its name from another early work, Love and Freindship ( sic-the misspelling was Austen’s). The film is Stillman’s fifth feature, and his second since the witty college-set comedy-musical Damsels in Distress (11) broke a 13-year absence. I am, as a character in the film might say, quite at my wits’ end to know what to make of it. It’s all these things at once, and somehow also an artful, super-knowing parody of all these things. It’s a historical costume comedy it’s an example of a specially privileged and prestigious subset of that genre, the Jane Austen adaptation and it’s that very singular thing, a cinematic subgenre all of its own, a Whit Stillman film. The cake and the costumes play a more ambivalent role than they normally might in other such films, for Love & Friendship perplexingly, and knowingly, occupies so many niches at once.
The cake says “historical authenticity”-it’s a safe bet that the film’s culinary department looked deep into recipe books of the late 18th century-but it also says “English literature costume drama,” signaling a genre as overtly as do all the flounces and furbelows lovingly created by Stillman’s costume department.
But it also somewhat resembles other cakes that we may have seen in other elegantly mounted historical films. It’s gorgeously designed and presented, and looks altogether historically plausible as just the kind of treat that might have been served at an English social event of the period, or that might have appeared in a still life or in the background of a contemporary social portrait. One of the most beautiful objects in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a cake-a perfect 1790s cake.
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