At cinemas nationwide now

When Whit Stillman released campus comedy Damsels in Distress in 2012, it felt curiously old-fashioned and a tad stilted; the buttoned-down characters seemed anachronistic in a contemporary American setting.  It was however, this very sensibility that raised the hopes for his adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan.

Happily, Love & Friendship is a perfect marriage of director and source material.  Adapting the novella himself, Stillman brings a sense of mannered anarchy to Austen that feels immeasurably fresher than the endless line of BBC period dramas that look pretty, but feel as stiff and constrained as a zealously laced corset.

Kate Beckinsale revitalises her career with her role as Lady Susan Vernon.  An unrepentant egotist with beauty and charm to spare, she’s a veteran warrior of passive-aggression and manipulation.  Forced to take refuge with the family of her late husband after causing a scandal with the spouse of another woman, she soon sets about worming her way into the family, leaving a trail of embittered women and enamoured men in her wake.  Beckinsale relishes every impeccably mannered verbal sling and arrow she gets to wield and she’s a joy throughout.  The delight on the face of her friend Alicia (Chloë Sevigny, the pair reunited from Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco) as Susan divulges her latest plan mirrors our own.  She’s aware she is in the presence of a master.

There is a whimsical slightness to the plot as a whole, and unlike the classic adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, is happy to function solely as comedy.  The intertitles which introduce each character feel like a device Wes Anderson utilised around the time of The Royal Tenenbaums, although there isn’t any trace of his signature melancholy to be found here.  In fact, Love & Friendship is often uproariously funny, with the bulk of the comic lifting split between Beckinsale and Tom Bennett as the nice-but-dim suitor of Lady Susan’s daughter.  It’s testament to Beckinsale’s brilliance that Bennett doesn’t sweep the entire film out from under her feet.  He’s a very broad comic creation, but used sparingly enough that he never grates.

Endlessly witty; and shot through with a healthy cynicism of which one feels Austen would have approved; Love & Friendship is a thoroughly accomplished piece of work played to the hilt by a sterling cast.  There isn’t a single wasted frame, and it feels utterly modern in its examination of the gender wars.  Expect to see it gracing numerous best-of lists come the end of the year.  Even among the iconic Austen adaptations that have graced the big and small screens down the years, this may well be the finest.