JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE - Mark Reviews Movies

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 22, 2025

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is such a great and informative title, and the setup of writer/director Laura Piani's certainly suggests some sort of self-aware, potentially subversive approach to a romantic comedy. It revolves around an aspiring writer, who is quite knowledgeable and almost obsessed with the English author who focused on women in the realms of love and social expectations. Our protagonist has an Austen character in mind for anyone she gets to know, it seems. For herself, it's Anne Elliot from Persuasion, mainly for the feeling that any good chance she had at love has passed her by and that's the end of that.

Our main character, though, is Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), who runs a rare English-language book shop in Paris but dreams of becoming a successful author like her hero. The one major problem for Agathe, apart from her skepticism about future romance for herself and unresolved trauma from the deaths of her parents, is that she cannot finish a story, let alone an entire novel.

She can come up with fine ideas, like her latest about a French woman who falls for a Japanese man at a sake bar (inspired by catching a glimpse of and imagining herself dance with a man at her favorite Chinese restaurant). After a chapter or two or three, however, Agathe has no clue or inspiration as to how to proceed. Is it because she has never experienced true love, especially following a two-year drought of any relationship or sex, or is there something deeper going on with this character?

From there, Piani's screenplay seems almost as uncertain as its central figure. There's plenty of possibility here, just as there is with Agathe, too, as our protagonist faces a potential love triangle, finds herself surrounded by support for her writing and at a writers retreat named after and run by descendants of her favorite author, and eventually realizes that her constant writer's block might have more to do with her own expectations for herself than anything else.

The movie gives us a well-rounded and complex character, in other words. The way it forces her into a half-hearted, half-considered, and predictable sort of romantic-comedy plot, though, doesn't do that character justice.

When we meet Agathe, she spends most of her time at the bookstore and the rest of it with her sister Mona (Alice Butaud) and nephew Tom (Roman Angel), with whom she lives. Mona has a more pragmatic view of romance, which is to say that, as a content single mother, she doesn't need it but is happy to have a man over for the night and immediately forget his name the next morning. The dichotomy between the sisters is intriguing, particularly because Mona has at least accepted their parents' deaths while Agathe is still struggling, but that's just one of a few notions that Piani drops in favor of something more familiar.

Initially, that's Agathe learning that Félix (Pablo Pauly), her co-worker and best friend who is also a regular on the family's couch, might have feelings for her beyond friendship. The two talk a lot about love, namely her inability to pursue it and his inability to commit to it. After Félix secretly sends the first chapter of her new book to writers' residency named after Austen in England, Agathe is almost as shocked to realize that her friend cares that much about her dream as she is at being accepted into the program. A farewell kiss from Félix before boarding the boat to cross the Channel has her wondering what will happen between them upon her return.

The rest of the story at the Austen-inspired estate is divided in two. Part of it is Agathe's efforts to write, regularly failing to continue her book but putting on a show of working on it, and her participation in the retreat with other writers. There are scenes here in which the writers discuss and debate the most significant elements and most essential purpose of literature, with Agathe having the belief, instilled in her by her late father, that it's simply to tell a story to which other people can connect, while others, such as poet Chéryl (Annabelle Lengronne), argue that writing should have some form of social conscience. These moments may feel as if they belong in a different version of this story that sincerely explores Agathe's role as a writer, but they're still strong in this one, regardless.

For the most part, though, the plot becomes about Agathe's conflict romantic feelings, torn between Félix back at home and Oliver (Charlie Anson), a multi-great grandnephew of Austen who is helping his mother Beth (Liz Crowther) run the residency as the health of his father Todd (Alan Fairbairn) declines. Oliver himself would likely fit just fine into one of the novels by his ancestor, so is his stuffy and somewhat emotionally distanced manner hiding the elusive man of Agathe's dreams?

This is a movie that's easy to fairly like, because of the richness of its protagonist, its comfortable level of familiarity, and its hints at bigger ideas about love, literature, and loss—likely in that order of attention. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is so torn between these story conceits and thematic concepts, though, that its own narrative comes across as unsure of its aims. One really, really wants to like it more than the movie allows.

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