To Paris, via Austen

This year's French film festival delivers a movie bringing a Gallic sensibility to that most English of novelists.

- BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

Aptly, the film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life - or as it was originally titled, Jane Austen a gâché ma vie - starts in a bookshop. It also ends in a bookshop - so it's bookshop-bookended.

And it's not just another librairie. It's Shakespeare and Company, the actual Anglophone institution in Paris that's one of the world's most famous bookshops. It has a, yes, storied history; the shop's two incarnations both served as gathering places for notable literary expats in the city throughout much of the 20th century.

The current Shakespeare and Company opened in 1951, in a former monastery a few minutes' procession from Notre-Dame.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is not the shop's first movie. Richard Linklater's Before Sunset started there, while the shop was also a location in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

But it's the first film about someone who works there, directed by someone who once worked there, and by someone who partly wrote it there - in guest writers' apartments above, and the adjoining café - and then filmed there.

The wrecked life of the title belongs to S&C bookseller Agathe Robinson, played with ungainly charm by Anglo-French actress Camille Rutherford. Robinson is single, antisocial, quirky, clumsy. She lives with her outgoing sister and nephew and is happiest with her head in a book by a certain Regency author. She would like to become a writer and experience love like the ones in her favourite Austen novels. She's in a should-they-shouldn't-they friendship with shop colleague Félix (Pablo Pauly), who encourages her literary dream.