of the host for tonight's show and i'm so pleased to have with me two of our three regular panelists bob brown and marilyn campbell jetstar and has the night off and tonight we're going to be discussing a film that is currently in our area cinema both at the princeton garden theater and also at montgomery cinema it's called love and friendship and it said jane austen written and directed by stillman and marilyn would you like to give us a summary of the plot sure part of this is based on i'm finished novella by jane austen called lady susan although it's not clear what jane austen might have called it if she actually published it it's a pistol or you know letters from lady susan to her friends and from her sister in law to her sister in law's mother and various other characters in the film so there are four of the characters in the film but the basic plot is that lady susan is a widow living by her wits in regency england she has a daughter who is just coming up to marriage and her scheme is to marry both her daughter and her so off to richmond which is a fairly common jane austen time the difference in this point is that lady susan is really despicable and those characters in jane austen's published novels are usually minor characters there are scheming self interested people in jane austen's books but usually not that heroine so this is a little different and i don't think i need to give any more plot and there certainly has been no shortage of jane austen a television and do we do we need another one that does this add that effect actually i i think i had read that this was one of the least i dabbed did for theater or film of her novels but to number of things so far there's been this isn't the first one that's been that there been a screenplay you know there was actually a play that was produced but there's sort of small potatoes type productions nothing that reached broadway for example which kind of surprises me because well maybe the raw material was something like with stillman had to really work it up into something that that work if he felt it didn't really work as it was so i don't was one of her early works and a pistol larry novels don't go so well on this on the screen at least as a screenplay it's hard to in that sort of thing and i said can i have this and she said no sharp and so witty and i saw it in the fairly empty theater i saw in an odd time one o'clock in the sun beautiful sunday afternoon who's going to be in a movie theater and there are a few people there and there were a couple of us is there she's very narcissistic well maybe she's not maybe she's just macchiavelli and yes she knows how to wrap a man around her little thing hard to say it's hard to say how whether or not she's really it's so popular to make jane austen novels and into films and then into television she says there's something about our age that you know i think this is recent i looked  the history of the public perception of jane austen you know in her time she was apparently not very widely read i mean pride and prejudice was probably the most widely read of her books and then only went through two editions but it wasn't until later and each age seems to have a different approach to how to take her and i think right now there's just something about her kind of a low key  approach and her characters is just so believable in a way that we've kind of embraced her where she doesn't have that sort of excess romanticism that you might associate with say the or something she's she's very subtle and i think the irony in a lot of her characterisation that very subtle irony is something that appeals to us to that i think one of the things that appeals about her works or something you mentioned already that she has great dialogue yeah very witty and some of her characters are very witty and i think that's part of it i think the other part of it is that she has very strong women characters and does she does they may be in most of her novels simply young women who don't have much money who are looking to get married and that's their lot in life but they are not relation and pretty much put upon by everybody right or or persuasions heroine who is not considered handsome by her very handsome father and sister and it's also very very put upon  down plea the whole marriage plot a little bit to make it more about girl coming of age women coming of age sorts of adaptations and the more recent that patients i think can have aunties great women and aren't their choices so limited and hadn't we come a long way so we have much more choices i mean to me it brings out the fact that while they all you all you really c in which women were expected to marry as their families dictated and that is part of part of most of our plot yes but in fact almost all of the women in her books and of marrying someone now for a lot of men yeah  i respect yes right i mean who respects them and you have that in this you have frederica who is refusing to take her mother's dictum that she must marry this twit she certainly doesn't want to be saddled with him but she does say something very interesting she says well if you're not going to marry what i what you're going to do when she says well i can teach right there's a careerist coming on pretty pretty early on seems to me that if we read a lot of a little bit about what still men he's an interesting independent film writer in a in an industry where there aren't too many of them there were ok when the for the what kind of career has he had to kind of movies has he may well have made a lot of movies that are about social mores certainly his first movie metropolitan is about a group of young people the girls are making their debuts and the boys are escorts and the whole plot is the whole round of debut parties and balls didn't like it she says well maybe you should read it before you decide you don't like jane right he actually started this script after one that he had been working on barcelona was not working out so he went back to something that he had experienced in his own life which was he was at harvard he hated school and the only thing kind of broke him out of a depressive funk was being invited to a debutante  party and so this is kind of autobiographical metropolitan area in a way he's he's revisiting that but as he says as he said in interviews from the removal of a couple of decades where he can look back at this with some perspective and see what that what was happening there and b and it's a lot of it is these kids are so unaware they're not they're unaware of themselves so there's a kind of the same sort of genuine as without being aware of what you are what you sanger who you are at the time very kind of that's part of the humor in that i said this and they say some pretty silly things without being aware of themselves or one of the things is that one of the young men and sort of the main character and i guess the most autobiographical one is a young man who  is parents and forced and he no longer has the kind of income that now that existed when writers were together his father started a new family and he's been kind of left out in the cold so he doesn't know quite the income necessary to have the does he have to rent a tuxedo with these parties see he has a raincoat with a lining instead of a decent winter coat which people and that's very similar of course to this is that lady susan has got to keep up the right years of being a wealthy woman even though she has no income right now right and that was still men's own experience at the time he was sort of an outsider in  this is although it's a period piece which the others were not this did not cost to middle and it's maybe that not that much of a departure from what he was doing before well and fact i read that he had said he very much at first he didn't like jane austin i think the first book that he had read by her was north and you're having he was totally turned off then somebody told him i think it was a woman told him you know to read it was either pride or prejudice or sense and sensibility and then he totally fell in love and he said he said one of the things that annoys him about the current jane austen revival if you can call it that is people want to say how contemporary she is he saying no she's very much a period she's very much of her age and that's the age that i like how i even take your brace those  values i don't want that to be contemporize mistake yeah i think i've read some interviews with him where he said you know i really i really like that time and this is not something that i find well i think in all in almost all these movies there is this feeling of these people kind of out of their time barcelona the funniest line i remember in barcelona at the very end it's about some young men who go to barcelona  meet young spanish ladies around and romance them and eventually one of them ends up marrying and and becoming an expectorant living in spain and he says to his friends who are visiting at the very end of the movie it's really great being married to a spanish woman because when i do something stupid she thinks it's an american thing who is very successful at fooling people but she's kind simply has to keep up the facade so do you feel some sympathy for lady susan not even though and she is very witty in some ways she is she's playing the cards have been dealt to her and living in the world as best she can and as a woman that as a woman the woman has windowed and has no money or power well one of the things i think she makes it work for one of the things i think she makes work for her is that she has dark prophetic she could be she could be a widow she has no money  she could be the paid companion that's right but that's not what she chooses to do she chooses instead to manipulate people into posting is mary crawford in there in mansfield park mary crawford is i did tract of young lady who's orphan but she has encountered but since she's an orphan she really can't live on her own she has to live with various relatives uncles aunts whatever here and there and and she can't set up her own household until she's married and she has zero morals so he can not respectable right he's never been trained to think that what he was doing was wrong just socially unacceptable i have and that was that's a reaction to almost anything that happens in the book in the book her brother also has no morals runs off with a married woman and and she speaks to the brother of the woman in this case by saying you know there was a so stupid they shouldn't have gotten caught because they could have carried on an affair under the the really stupid husband in this case without without harming their social side but isn't that social satire in a way because it isn't wasn't that really the morris of the day maybe fact that she does take on the mores of society is seen as a bad thing it is jane austen was aware that among the upper class this sort of thing happened and it was our audience some video picks picks of movies that we've seen that they can they can read but before we do that you want to sum up what you saw this oh i love this so much i i haven't been so satisfied as a movie in a long time just the production values alone but the way dialogue was projected in certain script when they were reciting poetry or something and the characterization the acting the cast was just amazing even a little bit parts like stephen fry just imagine casting him in a small tiny role like that i liked it so much that i said to my wife we've got to go see the scientists see this again because the little things i'm sure i missed yes so i did it's just a sheer joy i thought well i enjoyed it very much to the dialogue it's very even though the season is evil ye throughout the movie along with one other woman we found out i just found it so enjoyable and i thought that there was so much so i thought i thought it had a more stringent quality the most really like this but i would like to ask you if you've seen any movies on video that people could get on video now that you would recommend you know i thought about this i haven't looked at any video things and i would recommend i do note that cable t v shows now seem to have taken over in terms of developing characters and plots that can extend things in a much more deep way and a lot of film actors have started to turn to these production companies to find employment that is meaningful so i'm i'm very intrigued by shows like breaking bad looking at the entries and they're really good so i think that if you mark your calendars for july to come to the student film festival and the princeton public library i think you'll enjoy it i assume the time is close that they can submit yes do you ok first with the deadline now now we have to you have to go through all the entries and pick a program ok well i actually do have a video which  is a movie from last year which i think got a lot of critical notice but maybe not very many viewers which is a most violent year with us car wanted to see that film and i was the president stick around it didn't stick around i don't think why do you think not because i think it was people may have thought it was like a violent mob kind of movie and i'm not it's really a but he's in it and he crashes but then later on my hour later he returns he turned fifty suppose i did not die in the crash and my daughter tells me that he was supposed to die in the crash