Skip to content

Breaking News

Filmmaker Whit Stillman Launches Atheneum Series With ‘Love & Friendship’

Author
PUBLISHED: | UPDATED:

Whit Stillman, writer-director of the Oscar-nominated film “Metropolitan,” who also wrote and directed “The Last Days of Disco,” “Barcelona” and “Damsels in Distress,” always has written his own original screenplays, until last year, when he found a soul mate in Jane Austen.

“There are other authors that you love but you don’t endorse every word they write or like every scene in every book. But in Jane Austen it’s all beautiful and admirable and wonderful,” Stillman said.

Writer-director Whit Stillman will bring his film “Love & Friendship” to the Wadsworth Atheneum on March 21.

On Tuesday, March 21, Stillman will bring “Love & Friendship,” the film he adapted from Austen’s unfinished novella “Lady Susan,” to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He will do an onstage discussion before the film. The screening will kick off a four-part retrospective of Stillman’s films.

“Love & Friendship” could be the funniest Austen film ever made, and Stillman probably created the only Austen film whose leading lady isn’t admirable or wonderful. Kate Beckinsale portrays Lady Susan Vernon, a promiscuous noblewoman who is husband-hunting for her daughter Frederica. Susan’s main concern is how the match will benefit her. Chloe Sevigny portrays Lady Susan’s best friend and only confidante.

“I don’t want to make amoral films. It does have this amoral character who is the heroine and you enjoy watching her and her adventures. You get the Jane Austen moral content all around her,” Stillman said in a Skype interview from his home in France. “They represent the world of Jane Austen even if the lead character doesn’t, Frederica and the clergyman and some of the kinder characters.”

Whit Stillman adapted the film “Love & Friendship” from Jane Austen’s unfinished novella “Lady Susan.”

Hartford audiences will have fun with several amusingly unflattering references to Hartford in the script. In Austen’s novel, Sevigny’s character was British. Stillman turned her into a Nutmegger living in London in the 1790s, after the American Revolution, who dreads her husband’s threats to send her back to Connecticut.

“Chloe was one of the first people cast. Right before we started shooting we were brainstorming the character and decided she could be an American. It’s all steeped in the literature of the War of Independence, of American Tories having to go to Halifax or the West Indies or to London,” Stillman said. “It was a way of raising the stakes. She’d be tarred and feathered if she went back to Connecticut.”

He and Sevigny have roots in Connecticut. Sevigny is from Darien and Stillman’s ancestors lived in Wethersfield. “In Jane Austen’s day my family was living there, the Goodriches and the Rileys and the Stillmans. Later, they left Connecticut and went to Texas, founded the town of Brownsville, then ended up in New York,” he said.

He added that the film’s lead investor, Russell Pennoyer, is from Hartford. Stillman’s family plans to have a reunion in Wethersfield this summer.

“Metropolitan” will be shown March 22 at 7 p.m. at Wadsworth Atheneum.

The Atheneum also will show “Metropolitan” (March 22, 7 p.m.), “Barcelona” (March 23, 7 p.m.) and “The Last Days of Disco” (April 6, 8 p.m.) Others have described Stillman’s films as “comedies of manners” but he prefers the term “comedies of mores” or “comedies of identity.”

“These are young characters deciding on their paths in life,” he saaid. “When I was a university student, Erik Erikson’s ‘Identity: Youth and Crisis’ was very influential to me.”

With the exception of “Barcelona,” all of Stillman’s films are female-centric, focusing primarily on one or several female characters. “The women’s situation in romantic life is more interesting to me than the guy’s situation,” he said.

“Barcelona” will be shown March 23 at Wadsworth Atheneum.

Currently, Stillman is working on a TV series, “Cosmopolitan.” The pilot was shot in 2014 and he is working to expand it to six episodes. “I’m flailing around, working it through. It sort of has the flavor of ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Metropolitan.’ It is set in Europe,” he said. “I hope to make it more intriguing and dramatic, with a whiff of action or violence or events. It’s hard to do TV without events.”

“LOVE & FRIENDSHIP” will be shown March 21 at 7 p.m. at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford. It will be preceded by a reception at 6 p.m. and an onstage conversation with Stillman at 6:30 p.m. “Metropolitan” will be shown March 22 at 7 p.m., “Barcelona” on March 23 at 7 p.m. and “The Last Days of Disco” April 6 at 8 p.m. Admission to each program is $9, $8 seniors and students, $7 members, free to Insider Access members and above. thewadsworth.org.