Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (15)

(Subtitled) Strong language, sex, sex references

Writer/director Laura Piani’s sweet film is a French romantic comedy with an English twist, brimming with charm and literary allusions that readers are going to adore.

Agathe (Camille Rutherford) works at the famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris, though she secretly hopes to one day publish her own novel. She’s not into dating apps and prefers to believe that she’ll simply run into the man of her dreams in real life. Her cute colleague, Felix (Pablo Pauly), isn’t that principled — or is it delusional? — and sleeps around, though he also spends a suspicious amount of time at Agathe’s cramped apartment. When Agathe is awarded a stay at an exclusive retreat for writers, she not only finds the creativity to finally begin putting her ideas on paper, but also a bit of romance.

Presented as a lighthearted farce, complete with characters stepping (naked) through the wrong doors and a tense cross-country ride, in which Agathe complains in French (not realising her companion speaks the language), the film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.