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The official blog of Laemmle Theatres

Upcoming films in our Worldwide Wednesday series include movies from Brazil, Japan, France, Australia and Kazakhstan.

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Laemmle Theatres’ weekly series of fresh international films, Worldwide Wednesdays! Most are newer obscure films that we want to bring to a broader L.A. audience, screening in multiple venues all over L.A. County so cinephiles will not have to schlep to a single location. The films, however, come from many thousands of miles away! Screenings are Wednesday evenings with encore showings on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

PERFECT ENDINGS June 4, 7 & 8. After a decade-long relationship ends, filmmaker João finds himself at a crossroads in both his personal and professional lives. While trying to break into the film industry, he ends up directing amateur erotic films. With the support of loyal friends, João embarks on a dating journey, navigating modern romance and finding inspiration. Directed by Daniel Ribeiro. (Brazil, 2024)

BLOCK PASS June 11, 14 & 15. A queer motocross coming-of-age drama—sensitive, deeply felt, and quietly profound—that establishes Antoine Chevrollier as a filmmaker to watch. Reminiscent of Rebel Without a Cause but with dirt bikes as the vehicle for defiance, the film follows blood-brothers Willy (Sayyid El Alami) and Jojo (Amaury Foucher) as they navigate grief, masculinity, and unspoken desires. Directed by Antoine Chevrollier. (2024, France/United States)

ZÉNITHAL JUNE 18, 21 & 22. Ti-Kong, the famous kung fu master, is found dead. Could the assassin be the Machiavellian Dr. Sweeper? Insecure Francis falls into his clutches as he becomes a crucial part of Sweeper’s scheme to preserve absolute male domination over the globe. That is, unless Sonia, Francis’ girlfriend, decides to take action to save him, restore their relationship, and establish peace between the sexes. Directed by Jean-Baptiste Saurel. (France, 2024)

SHALL WE DANCE? June 25, 28 & 29. Shohei Sugiyama seems to have it all — a high-paying job as an accountant, a beautiful home, a caring wife and a doting daughter he loves dearly. However, he feels something is missing in his life. One day while commuting on the train he spots a beautiful woman staring wistfully out a window and eventually decides to find her. His search leads him head-first into the world of competitive ballroom dancing. Directed by Masayuki Suô. (Japan, 1996)

SHANGHAI BLUES July 2, 5 & 6. In 1937, a soldier and a young woman meet in darkness under a bridge as they seek refuge during a bombing. Although they can’t see each other’s faces, they promise to meet again after the dust settles. Ten years later, the soldier, now a burgeoning songwriter and tuba player, is back in town desperately searching for his would-be soulmate. As fate would have it, they unknowingly end up living in the same building. Through a series of mishaps, he mistakes her new roommate for his love interest, and love triangle hijinks ensue. Directed by Tsui Hark. (Hong Kong, 1984)

THE SURVIVAL OF KINDNESS July 9, 12 & 13. In a cage on a trailer in the middle of the desert, BlackWoman is abandoned. But BlackWoman seems not ready to pass…she escapes, and walks through pestilence and persecution, from desert to canyon to mountain to city, on a quest that leads to a city, recapture and tragedy. BlackWoman, escaping once more, must find solace in her beginnings. Directed by Rolf de Heer. (Australia, 2022)

THE POLISH WOMEN July 16, 19 & 20. Rio de Janeiro, early 20th century. Escaping famine in Poland, Rebeca (Valentina Herszage), together with her son Joseph, arrives in Brazil to meet her husband, who immigrated first hoping for a better life for the three of them. However, she finds a completely different reality in Rio de Janeiro. Rebeca discovers that her husband has passed away and ends up a hostage of a large network of prostitution and trafficking of Jewish women headed by the ruthless Tzvi (Caco Ciocler). To escape this exploitation, she will need to transgress her beliefs. Directed by João Jardim. (Brazil, 2023)

A WORLD APART July 23, 26 & 27. Arriving during a snowstorm to take a post at a tiny rural school on the verge of closure, Cortese (Antonio Albanese) finds himself far from the comforts of Rome and faced with a lively, multi-age class. With the support of Agnese (Virginia Raffaele), the school’s passionate vice-principal, he gradually sheds his urban habits and rediscovers the true meaning of teaching — rooted in empathy, resilience, and the power of community. Directed by Riccardo Milani. (Italy, 2024)

FORBIDDEN GAMES July 30, August 2 & 3. When her parents are killed in an air strike while trying to flee Paris during the German invasion, five-year-old Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) (“in a performance that rips the heart out” – New York Times) wanders into the French countryside, where she encounters 11-year-old peasant boy Michel (Georges Poujouly). As they build a special, secret friendship, the adults play their own games of buffoonish peasant feuds. A masterpiece of French post-war cinema, Forbidden Games won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival — and then became a worldwide art house smash. Directed by René Clément. (France, 1952)

THE TIME IT TAKES August 6, 9 & 10. A devoted father shares a special bond with his young daughter, but as she grows, the enchantment begins to fade. Adolescence brings distance and disillusionment. She spirals into drug use, concealing her struggles from her father. Refusing to turn away, he takes a decisive step — bringing her to Paris in a final attempt to rekindle their connection and guide her back to herself. Directed by Francesca Comencini. (Italy/France, 2024)

THE TIES THAT BIND US August 13, 16 & 17. A poignant adaptation of Alice Ferney’s L’Intimité, Carine Tardieu’s The Ties that Bind Us explores how unexpected bonds can transform our beliefs and definitions of family. Sandra (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a librarian who never wanted children, reluctantly agrees to care for her neighbor’s young son Elliot while his mother gives birth. When tragedy strikes, Sandra, Elliot, and his father find their lives unexpectedly intertwined. Tender and empathetic, Tardieu’s film is a moving meditation on grief, connection, and the forms love and family can take. Directed by Carine Tardieu. (France/Belgium, 2024)

BAURYNA SALU August 27, 30 & 31. In Kazakhstan, the ancient nomadic tradition of “bauryna salu” dictates that firstborn children are raised by their grandparents. Following this custom, Yersultan is sent to live with his grandmother from birth, growing up in her care while feeling increasingly abandoned by his parents. Though he forms a deep bond with his grandmother, Yersultan remains emotionally distant from his parents. At age 12, his world is shattered by his grandmother’s death, which forces him to leave the only home he’s ever known and return to live with a family he barely recognizes. Directed by Askhat Kuchinchirekov. (Kazakhstan, 2023)

CROUPIER 25th Anniversary Screening with Clive Owen in Person June 4 at the Royal.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 25th anniversary screening of ‘Croupier,’ the sleeper hit that helped to save the specialized movie business during a dry period at the beginning of the 21st century. Mike Hodges, the director of the British crime thriller ‘Get Carter’ with Michael Caine, had his most acclaimed film since then when he directed ‘Croupier.’

Clive Owen, who had mainly appeared in British television dramas before this, rose to full-fledged movie stardom as a result of this movie. He plays an aspiring writer who takes a job at a casino where he juggles a few romantic relationships and also has to contend with a robbery threat. Alex Kingston, Gina McKee, Kate Hardie, and Nicholas Ball costar. The script was written by Paul Mayersberg, who also wrote Nicolas Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Eureka,’ as well as Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.’

The film opened in England in 1999 but made few waves at the box office. When it came to America in 2000, veteran marketing executive Mike Kaplan (who had worked frequently with Stanley Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, and Malcolm McDowell) devised a whole new marketing campaign that highlighted Owen’s resemblance to tough-guy Hollywood stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Richard Widmark. The strategy worked, and the picture lit up art house screens for several months, eventually reaching mainstream theaters as well.

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden called the film “a breezy meditation on life as a game of chance,” and he added, “Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.” Newsweek’s David Ansen declared, “Coolly hypnotic, the lean British sleeper ‘Croupier‘ is a reminder that movies don’t have to wave their arms and scream to hold our attention.” Roger Ebert wrote that Owen has “the same sort of physical reserve as Sean Connery in the Bond pictures.”

Newsday’s Gene Seymour wrote, “Not since 1971 has British director Mike Hodges made a movie as deep, dark and compelling as this thriller.” British film journal Sight and Sound concurred that “Hodges is unfailingly professional in matching style to story.”

The movie’s success catapulted Owen to full-fledged stardom, and he went on to work with many of the world’s top directors and stars. He earned an Oscar nomination when he costarred with Julia Roberts, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman in Mike Nichols’ ‘Closer.’ He costarred in Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ with Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster. Owen was part of the large ensemble cast in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning ‘Gosford Park.’ He had the leading role in Alfonso Cuaron’s futuristic thriller ‘Children of Men.’ He played Sir Walter Raleigh to Cate Blanchett’s Queen Elizabeth in ‘Elizabeth: The Golden Age,’ then re-teamed with Roberts in ‘Duplicity.’ He also starred with Juliette Binoche in Fred Schepisi’s ‘Words and Pictures.’

Owen scored on television as well, starring in Steven Soderbergh’s acclaimed medical series ‘The Knick.’ He earned an Emmy nomination playing Ernest Hemingway in Philip Kaufman’s ‘Hemingway and Gelhorn,’ co-starring with Nicole Kidman. In Ryan Murphy’s TV miniseries ‘American Crime Story,’ Owen played President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair. And he recently played an older version of detective Sam Spade in ‘Monsieur Spade.’

Mike Kaplan will introduce the screening by reporting on its troubled but ultimately triumphant history. Owen will participate in a Q&A after the film.

The Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) @ Laemmle NoHo ~ The World’s Greatest: Photography On and Off Stages.

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The Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) @ Laemmle NoHo

The World’s Greatest: Photography On and Off Stages

Artists: Candace Biggerstaff, Ryder Collins, Thouly Dosios, David Hanes-Gonzalez, Kevin Salk  

Curator: Dr. Rotem Rozental, Executive Director and Chief Curator, LACP

Opening reception: May 29, 6:00 to 8:00 P.M.; walk-through with Candace Biggerstaff, Thouly Dosios, David Hanes-Gonzalez and Dr. Rotem Rozental at 6:30pm. 

Free and open to the public, follow this link to RSVP.

The World’s Greatest: Photography On and Off Stages marks the second collaboration between LACP and the Laemmle Theatres, organizing exhibitions and public programs around photography and visual storytelling.  

Exploring spaces for storytelling and their importance for popular culture in the American west and beyond, this exhibition turns its attention to that as of entertainment that usually remain on the edges of mainstream culture—but that is precisely where they thrive and build micro-communities, formed by shared interests, rituals and creative languages. In that sense, this exhibition is interested in vernacular spaces of entertainment that created, reflected and amplified collective traditions and cultural interests. With particular relevance to the Laemmle Theatres, a beloved space for cultural consumption and production in Los Angeles, this exhibition regards the relationships between communities and their entertainers, traveling forms of spectacle and amazement, and the people who turn such spaces into reality.  

With that in mind, The World’s Greatest is interested in self-proclaimed heroes and beloved underground icons, athletes that drive national passions and seasonal entertainers that have built a loyal fan base for decades. The exhibition is interested in the people that define these communities—both the performers and their audiences–but it also traces the histories of these spaces and the ways in which their past continues to inform their present. 

The participating artists capture the shifts in the lives of the events and the people behind them, focusing on the human experience that defines what live shows, fairs, boxing matches and circus arenas might have in common. These projects also speak about the formation of alternative families and tightknit communities, which would not have existed without performative spaces. Perhaps this is also a way to consider family life as a performative space, which exists in different ways in public and private spaces. These stories, in essence, are stories of belonging. 

Candace Biggerstaff found herself at the circus because of her father-in-law, who was a circus historian. She and her husband traveled with him for two years in the mid 1970s, starting with Circus Vargas when she was 20 years old. In other words, Biggerstaff got to run away with the circus almost every year since she was a very young adult; her adulthood was in fact defined by her relationship with a place that insists on fantasy, magic and the illusions we tend to attach to childhood and early life. That colorful vibrancy came to define both her compositions and outlook on the world. The experience of not only running away with the circus, but also capturing traveling companies became integral to her photographic practice.  The performers became familiar friends, the elephants became cherished beings, and the connections between them and their audience became the focal point of her documentary work. She has been following them ever since, capturing the animals and the humans entrusted with their well-being, witnessing the formation of nontraditional family structures behind the scenes. Biggerstaff’s work begins with life in the circus outside the big top, processing her own views about what a family is, or what it could be. 

For David Hanes-Gonzalez, the discovery of Mexican boxing style became an entry point to his own cultural genealogy; a way to overcome the frustration he felt about his lack of connection to his Mexican roots, as a first generation Mexican American. What began as a short project turned into years-long preoccupation, which also led him to move to Mexico while capturing an intimate story about the prominence of the sport within local culture and its diasporic communities. This is an important point of connections between Mexico and Los Angeles, where a strong tradition of Mexican and American-Mexican boxers who rose to prominence persists. There are rivalries, fans, traditions and legacies that provide a close and intimate connection between communities on both sides of the border; an important point of cultural contact between individuals with complex identities and collective experiences. 

Kevin Salk began documenting punk bands while barely in high school. They were his friends, and they were emerging right in front of him as cultural heroes of the underground scenes in Southern California. Decades later, he picked up his camera again and went back to chronicle the energies, dedication and reach of his friends and their peers in the metal and punk domains of California. His work provides both a glimpse into the origins and a look toward the present and future of these sub-cultures and their veteran protagonists.  

When Ryder Collins documents county fairs in the state of Washington, he observes shifting economic circumstances and the demise of a form of entertainment that was once vital for agricultural communities across the country. County fairs became part of the American landscape in the early eighteenth century, after having emerged as agricultural markets in 1765. In that sense, the fair predates the union. Elkhana Watson from New England is often credited as the “Father of US agricultural fairs,” after introducing a hybrid event: An exhibit of animals that included a competition. Collins’s extended documentary project takes such histories into account, while considering his family’s own agricultural histories and the impact of shifting financial circumstances. 

Thouly Dosios have been capturing the streets of Los Angeles, her adoptive home, for nearly a decade. Taken by the city’s openness and cultural tapestries of traditions, cultures, traditions, approaches and lived experiences, Dosios captures contradictions and the constant pivots that define this place. In that sense, the county fair amalgamates these loose ends into an unexpected meeting point, of performativity and entertainment, collective experiences and individual impressions.  

A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY Q&A’s June 12 at the NoHo and June 14 at the Monica Film Center.

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June 12, 7:30 P.M. at the Laemmle NoHo:
This screening of A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY is co-presented by Video Consortium with a Q&A to follow featuring filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed, co-writer/editor Christopher Stoudt, and special guest, moderated by Video Consortium organizer Lauren Mahoney.
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June 14, 10:00 A.M. at the Laemmle Monica Film Center:
 
This screening of A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY is co-presented by From the Heart Productions and Authentic Global Film Awards, with a Q&A to follow moderated by Variety film critic Carlos Aguilar, featuring director Rachel Elizabeth Seed in conversation with producer Ana Lydia Monaco and additional special guest. In this discussion, they will pull back the curtain on the visionary production of A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY‘s recreation sequences, produced by Monaco in Los Angeles.
June 16, 7:00 P.M. at the Laemmle Monica Film Center:
Q&A with director Rachel Elizabeth Seed + Gallerist Peter Fetterman to follow this screening. Co-presented by Peter Fetterman Gallery.

NORTHERN LIGHTS restored.

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Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the sui generis Northern Lights marks one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the late 1970s. Dramatizing the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s, Northern Lights captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers as they toil and struggle against the combined forces of industry and finance. Amid this paroxysm of class tension, two young lovers find themselves swept up in the tide. Shot on location (on grain-rich black-and-white 16mm) in the dead of winter and featuring an astonishing cast of non-professional actors, this handmade masterpiece remains a stirring monument to collectivity. 

Laemmle Theatres will open the restored Northern Lights June 13 at the Royal. The latest episode of Inside the Arthouse will feature the film.

Restoration Credits 

IndieCollect produced the new 4K restoration for Kino Lorber. It was created by scanning the 35mm Fine Grain Master Positive in 6.5K. Color correction by Jason Crump of Metropolis was personally supervised by co-director John Hanson. Special thanks to Mike Pogorzelski & Josef Lindner of the Academy Film Archive for their cooperation. The 4K restoration was funded by Kino Lorber, IndieCollect donor John Ahlgren, and additional support from the Golden Globe Foundation and Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust.

About the Production 

Northern Lights was filmed from 1975 to 1977 in northwestern North Dakota near the Canadian border in an area settled by Norwegian immigrants, some of whom still spoke their homeland dialect at the time of production. 

Back in 1915, small farmers banded together to organize the Nonpartisan League, the grassroots movement that is the backdrop for the film’s love story. Their descendants threw their full support behind the production. Co-Directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson cast many of them in speaking roles alongside lead actors Robert Behling, Joe Spano and Susan Lynch. Acting for the first time in scripted roles, these rural folk gave the film a gritty authenticity in the tradition of the Italian Neorealist film movement. Made for just over $300,000 with a small crew from San Francisco, Northern Lights was a production of Cine Manifest, the film collective that Hanson and Nilsson had co-founded. 

Filmed in stark black and white, Northern Lights captures the stunning imagery of the High Plains landscape, its farmers silhouetted against the immense northern sky. Widely acclaimed for its cinematography, it was shot in 16mm and was one of the first independent films to be blown up to 35mm at the DuArt Film Lab. After its 1978 world premiere at the Dakota Theater in Crosby, North Dakota, Hanson, Nilsson and Associate Producer Sandra Schulberg took the movie to the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Camera d’Or Award for Best First Feature. 

The Cannes Festival recognition led to other festivals. It won the Grand Prize at the Portugal International Film Festival and Special Jury Awards at the U.S. Film Festival (the forerunner to Sundance) and at Houston’s WorldFest. At the 1979 New York Film Festival, Northern Lights was shown opening night of the Festival’s “American Independents” sidebar. 

Initially, Hanson, Nilsson and Schulberg distributed Northern Lights themselves, going theater to theater throughout the Dakotas and Upper Midwest. In 1980, with filmmakers Maxi Cohen, Joel Gold, Deborah Shaffer, Stewart Bird, Glenn Silber & Barry Brown, they founded First Run Features, hiring veteran Fran Spielman from New Yorker Films to get their films book in theaters across the U.S. 

In 1982, for the second season of the PBS “American Playhouse” series, Lindsay Law acquired the broadcast rights to Northern Lights and it won the Neil Simon Award for Best Dramatic Screenplay. It has since been acclaimed worldwide as one of the best American Independent movies of all time.

1970s New York City on the brink ~ DROP DEAD CITY opens tomorrow.

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Named after the famous New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” Drop Dead City is the first documentary to focus on the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, an overlooked episode in urban American history that saw that city of eight million people come face to face with bankruptcy.

The film is an immersive ticking-clock drama built entirely from archival 16mm footage interspersed with present eyewitness interviews, and propelled by a great soundtrack drawn from 1970s radio as it follows a year in the life and near death of this iconic city. Laemmle Theatres opens the film May 22 at the NoHo and May 23 at the Monica Film Center and Town Center.

The film captures N.Y.C. at a moment of contrast, gritty and down on its luck, but also vibrant and alive. The basic underlying questions of governance, community and economic priorities are of immediate relevance to Los Angeles and so many other American cities.

These are unprecedented times for Americans, and for our public institutions. The systematic dismantling of the administrative state, as well as the demonizing of public servants, is something we are watching happen every day. The playbook of today’s right-wing government bashing has it’s roots in the rightward swing of the Republican Party in the 1970’s. NYC’s near-bankruptcy was a critical event in this transformation. Drop Dead City addresses these themes and ideologies, and examines the origins of NYC’s problems with an even hand. Was it the banks, the unions, the poor who were arriving, or the rich who were leaving? Was it the recession? Was it cynicism in the White House or incompetence in City Hall?

“Our goal as filmmakers was to honor the story and the people in it – the men and women who stepped up to deal with this challenge as well as the so-called ordinary New Yorkers who dealt with this uncertainty as a fact of life during this tumultuous period,” said directors Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn. “While the film often feels like a wild time machine ride to New York in its good-old bad days, we also hope it inspires conversations on how urban centers can fairly cope with the enormous challenges we face today.”

“The film raises striking parallels with the present…a visual delight for anyone who enjoys footage of vintage New York City…Set to a funk and soul soundtrack that would make Tarantino’s music supervisor bow in respect.” – WNYC / Gothamist

100% Rotten Tomatoes rating!

Drop Dead City is produced and directed by Peter Yost and Michael Rohatyn. Executive produced by Karoline Durr. The archival producer is Frauke Levin. Cinematography by Jerry Risius. Edited by Don Kleszy and Anna Auster. The film’s running time is 108 minutes.

RAN, Akira Kurosowa’s final epic masterpiece, back on the big screen May 23.

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There are movies. There is cinema. And then there is auteur cinema. All are best experienced theatrically, but the last category, in particular, necessitates the big screen, the darkness, the audience of strangers. Next week, we are thrilled to once again unveil Ran, the 27th film by legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress).

In its epic scale, stylistic grandeur and tragic contemplation of human destiny, Ran (literally, “chaos” or “turmoil”) brings together the great themes and gorgeous images of the director’s life work. A brilliantly conceived meditation on Shakespeare’s King Lear crossed with Japan’s 16th-century civil wars, it stars the great Tatsuya Nakadai (Kagemusha, High and Low, Yojimbo, Hara Kiri) as Lord Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging ruler who decides to abdicate and divide his land equally among his three sons, unleashing an intense power struggle as his sons and daughters-in-law scheme for power and revenge. A spectacular adventure punctuated by epic battle scenes, Ran was, at the time of its release, the most expensive film ever made in Japan, with breathtaking color and a visual splendor that remains unparalleled. (Kurosawa devised the entire film in watercolors ten years before production began). Named Best Foreign Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle and Best Film of the Year by the National Society of Film Critics, Ran was also Oscar-nominated for Best Director, Cinematography, and Art Direction, with Emi Wada winning for her dazzling, three-years-in-the-making costumes.

“Spectacular! Among the most thrilling movie experiences a viewer can have!” -The New York Times

“Awe inspiring! Takes its place among the major screen versions of Shakespeare. The battle scenes are horrifying, yet extraordinarily beautiful.” -The Village Voice

“Kurosawa’s late-period masterpiece, transposing King Lear to period Japan, is one of the most exquisite spectacles ever made, a color-coordinated epic tragedy of carnage and betrayal—passionate, somber, and profound.” -New York Magazine

“Laura Piani’s splendid debut balances reality with the effervescent charm of vintage swooners.” JANE AUSTEN WRECKED MY LIFE opens May 23.

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If you are in need of some escapism that piques rather than insults your intelligence, we strongly recommend the new French rom-com Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. We open it May 23 at the Royal and May 30 at all but one of our other theaters. (Its writer-director, Laura Piani, is interviewed on the latest episode of Inside the Arthouse.)

Variety’s Chief Film Critic Peter Debruge perfectly captures the film’s charms in his review, whose subhead reads “Laura Piani’s splendid debut balances reality with the effervescent charm of vintage swooners.”

Debruge’s review is worth quoting at length:

“A diet of romantic literature is a recipe for disappointment in real life, argues French director Laura Piani with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, about an aspiring writer who’s convinced she was born in the wrong century, if only because she still believes in things like soulmates and courtship. Part homage, part referendum on all those love stories that make it look easy, Piani’s just-jaded-enough alternative fills the regrettable gap left by such feel-good classics as Four Weddings and a Funeral and the Austen-inspired Bridget Jones’s Diary. Sony Pictures Classics plans a limited release for May 23, going wide a week later.

“At a time when practically the entire rom-com genre has gravitated to streaming, this bilingual theatrical offering from Sony Pictures Classics feels like the best kind of throwback. 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 realizing her companion speaks the language), the film is at once old-fashioned and refreshingly, realistically up to date in its take on modern courtship.

“Blocked in both love and literature, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is an exasperated Frenchwoman working at Shakespeare and Company, the adorably cluttered English-language bookstore situated just a few meters from Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. According to Austen’s standards, Agathe — who identifies most closely with Anne Elliot in Persuasion — might seem at genuine risk of spinsterhood, having made it to her mid-30s without a prospect. It’s been years since she’s had so much as a kiss, and the hopeless singleton finds herself pouring all of her idealism and frustration into futile creative writing exercises until … inspiration strikes during a solitary dinner as she stares deep into a novelty sake cup.

“Behind Agathe’s back, her encouraging (if frequently inappropriate) best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly) sends off the first few chapters of this new project to a writer’s residency at Austen’s onetime abode, hoping to give Agathe the “kick in the arse” she needs. Friendship, as Austen herself wrote, is “the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” The next thing she knows, Agathe is crossing the Channel to visit the author’s estate. There, she spars with (but also falls for) one of the author’s distant relatives: Austen’s priggish great-great-great-grandnephew Oliver (Charlie Anson).

“Piani shot the entire film in France, but it truly feels as if it has a foot in both cultures. Anson could be a young Rupert Everett’s bookish brother, and has clearly studied every wince and eye flutter in Hugh Grant’s arsenal, combining such tools into a 21st-century version of the Mr. Darcy archetype. From the frosty first encounter between Agathe and Oliver, in which she steps off the ferry and promptly retches on his loafers, audiences should find themselves rooting for these two to recognize how compatible they are.

“But Agathe is wrestling with more than just her insecurities, as kissing Félix just before she took the ferry has stirred up newfound feelings for her old friend. Félix is a serial womanizer and a classic cad with whom she’s always felt a certain unexplored sexual tension, despite their many years of platonic companionship, and even in his absence, this development stands to complicate whatever she feels for Oliver. (Lest one doubt where viewers’ allegiances should lie, composer Peter von Poehl’s score practically quotes “Yumeji’s Theme” from In the Mood for Love, a romantic melody that’s all but impossible to resist.)

“A few decades ago, a film like this might have had little chance of success competing with Hollywood-made rom-coms, but that steady stream has moved to, well, streaming, leaving a space wide open for audiences still looking to laugh and swoon at their local art house. As its almost defeatist title implies, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has an intriguing relation to such escapism, recognizing that fiction in all its forms (whether literary or cinematic) has spoiled so many people’s expectations of what love can be.

“Piani casts a gangly, wide-eyed actor to play Agathe. Rutherford is far from the dime-a-dozen ingénues so often seen in French movies, with their voluptuous figures and vacant expressions — and so much the better, as it sets an unrealistic standard for young women to aspire to (while no such standard exists for their gargoyle-like male co-stars). Instead, she excels at being awkward, incorporating pratfalls and physical comedy into a role that doesn’t turn the head of every man she meets. Although Agathe is quite lovely in a less conventional way, Piani allows her intellect and personality to be the character’s most attractive traits.”

Click here to read the rest of the review.