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The result is a thoroughly individuated and breathing adaptation, a film that finds a natural marriage of Stillman's never-miss-a-beat verbosity and the knotty discourse of high society one-upmanship.

Stillman's first period film (I know, I know; Last Days of Disco was set in the past, but this one goes back centuries, not a couple decades) is his most antic and laugh-out-loud funny.

A perfect marriage of source material and directorial vision, Stillman's Love & Friendship is a sumptuously designed depiction of Georgian England that employs its extravagant costumes and opulent settings to comment on the massive economic stakes at play beneath the plot's surface melodrama.

While [Stillman's debt to Austen] is clear, this adaptation of an epistolary novella became a film only with significant script work, fleshing out scenes to create engaging characters and absorbing dialogue from exchanges relayed originally through extensive letters.

The film is meticulous and quiet, giving each actor a moment to play against the shining perfection of Kate Beckinsale's scheming Lady Susan, the title character of Austen's novel. Beckinsale's performance is as great as any lead's in any period piece ever made, worthy of Bette Davis in a 1930s Warner Bros. costume drama, but sexier and more subtle.

Stillman masterfully extracts, condenses, and manipulates the novella's epistolary narration to craft quips that retain their Austenian origins while evincing a signature Stillman flair.

Stillman's most purely confectionery film to date. It is his first without any undercurrent of pain, loss, loneliness, or compromise, and it arrives in theaters as essentially a stripped-down distillation of his method of comedy.

Stillman doesn't have as much fun with the camera as one could wish. (One misses the silly POVs of Barcelona.) Combined with the structural principle of looping back to Alicia and the deadpan sameness of the dialogue, the lack of compositional variation makes it possible to tire of the film's concept two-thirds of the way through. Otherwise, Love & Friendship is highly entertaining, with Austen's text fitting Stillman's style like a Regency-era glove.

This adaptation is really a rewrite. And maybe that's a particularly attractive mode, when the novel to be adapted is in epistolary form. The game of the epistolary novel is to maintain a constant haze between foreground and background, between what is reported to a correspondent and what the reader must infer has happened: it is the art form of gossip, of the hint. That haze allows Stillman his delicately sincere inversion of Austen's amused irony.

It may be regarded as the sharpest take on Austen by a bona fide auteur... What makes Love & Friendship revelatory is the way it harmonizes with the world of the urban haute bourgeoisie Stillman insouciantly depicted in his Austen-imbued debut Metropolitan (90) and The Last Days of Disco (98), as well as that of the American expatriate experience in Barcelona (94) and the preppily feminine campus of the less naturalistic Damsels in Distress (11).

The style of "Love & Friendship" is comprehensive and ranges from the images and the dialogue through to the performances, the décor, and the costumes. Beckinsale displays a powerful sense of gesture; her poised head and precise gaze seem to divide and organize the space around her. She lends Lady Susan a sense of lightly borne self-mastery that matches her mastery of the rules of the social game that she's compelled to play.

Love & Friendship marks Stillman's reunion with Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny (playing Susan's American compatriot), whom he directed in The Last Days of Disco way back in 1998. This latest effort does feel like a culmination of sorts; by setting the film in an age where family name and reputation are paramount, the director's long-gestating themes of restlessness nestle under the façade of formality to wreak necessary havoc.