In the opening sequence of Love and Friendship the cast take up carefully arranged positions on the front steps of an imposing grey stone country house. Each character is introduced using a close-up framed by a softly overlaid vignette and a witty one-line description on-screen (Lord Manwaring is ‘a divinely attractive man’, Charles Vernon an ‘obliging husband’). Quickly establishing an air of caricature and self-awareness, Whit Stillman’s decision to open with a series of formal portraits seems pleasingly appropriate for a dramatisation of a piece of Austen’s juvenilia: the rounded portraits are vaguely reminiscent of those by Cassandra Austen for Austen’s only illustrated early work, ‘The History of England’. Stillman’s Oscar-nominated Metropolitan (1990) – in which the protagonists argue over the merits of Austen’s Mansfield Park – also uses playful on-screen text to create an ironic undertone, but his choice to formalise the introduction of the characters in Love and Friendship in metafictional style means that his adaptation begins on bolder and more playful footing than many other Austen films in the Merchant Ivory mode.

Despite taking its title from another of Austen’s epistolary short pieces, Stillman’s script stays close to the text and plot of ‘Lady Susan’, written between 1793-94. The film follows the machinations of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), whose reputation as a coquette causes a great deal of anxiety for her deceased husband’s family, the Vernons, when she arrives at their country estate determined to charm. Much to the dismay of her sister-in-law, Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell), and Catherine’s parents (Jemima Redgrave and James Fleet), Lady Susan succeeds in capturing the heart of Catherine’s eligible younger brother, Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel). Meanwhile, Lady Susan is also working on her plan to marry her sixteen-year-old daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark), the ‘greatest simpleton on earth’, to wealthy landowner Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), a match that the shrinking but determined Frederica wholly opposes. Many of Lady Susan’s wittiest aphorisms are taken straight from Austen’s text, including her delicious pronouncement on her friend Alicia Johnson’s husband (Stephen Fry), that he is ‘too old to be agreeable and too young to die’, her firm belief that ‘Facts are such horrid things!’, and her sly assertion that ‘There is something agreeable in feelings so easily worked on’.

The film is both sensitive and imaginative in its translation of Austen’s material from the form of epistolary retrospective to direct action. The addition of the new character of Mrs Cross, Lady Susan’s maid, who ‘packs and unpacks’, allows private conversations to take place in the bedroom where Lady Susan can lay her schemes bare in a manner akin to her most revealing letters in the text. Conversations between Lady Susan and her confidant Mrs Johnson (Chloë Sevigny) in the confines of carriages, or while walking in the cloisters of a college, also cleverly capture some of the intimacy of the epistolary mode in visual form. But the most overt and literal dramatisation of a letter is one sent by Catherine Vernon to her mother, conveying her anxious fears that Reginald will be seduced by Lady Susan. As Catherine’s father reads the letter aloud to his wife, complete with punctuation, the words of the letter appear on the screen in imitation eighteenth-century hand. And as if in homage to the text’s epistolary form, Stillman also increases the role of the letter in the climax to the drama by having Reginald De Courcy snatch a missive from Lady Susan to Mrs Johnson to reveal that Lady Susan has been seeing Manwaring in London alongside himself. (In Austen’s text, Reginald learns of Lady Susan’s duplicity through conversation with Mr Johnson.) Stillman is not afraid to make the letter the location for high drama, and his choice seems in keeping with Austen’s continued attention to the circulation, writing, and reading of letters in her novels, while moving away from the epistolary form proper.

Kate Beckinsale is ceaselessly compelling in the role of Lady Susan, and delivers Austen’s lines with just the right amount of irony and poise. Clever, too, is the gradual evolution of her sumptuous wardrobe from black widow’s lace to rich purple and crimson satins, as the Vernons gradually become more aware of her duplicity while remaining no less in awe of her charm. Morfydd Clark is excellent in the role of timid, stuttering Federica Vernon, and Tom Bennett also excels in the role of Sir James Martin, whose stupidity and overwhelming desire to please combine to produce some delicious comic moments. Sir James is a mere sketch in Austen’s text, described in the letters passed between Lady Susan and Mrs Johnson as ‘contemptibly weak’ and ‘silly’: in company he ‘talked a good deal […] mixing more laughter with his discourse than the subject required’ and ‘said many things over and over again’. The film fleshes out this outline with relish, as Sir James introduces himself to the Vernons via a circular and repetitious explanation of his misunderstanding of the name of their seat, Churchill (“I’d heard ‘church’ and ‘hill’ but couldn’t find either. All I could see was this big house”). Later he is simultaneously amused and bemused when presented with peas at dinner, thinks that Cowper’s ‘verse’ and his ‘poetry’ are two different things, and enters into a very earnest – and very funny – reflection on the twelve commandments. Stillman has said that he would like to adapt another Austen work and let’s hope that he does, for it’s sure to be a treat.

Love and Friendship was released in UK cinemas on 27 May 2016 and will be available on DVD and blu-ray on 26 September 2016.