Great loves and great whites
Love is in the air and blood is in the water in this triple feature review of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, Dangerous Animals and Materialists. Guard your heart and your extremities.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life — Laura Piani
How many of you have ever felt personally victimised by Jane Austen?
Maybe she romanticised sister-heavy households. Or made you think that reading a lot, being sassy and walking everywhere would make you irresistible to rich men. Or gave you unrealistic expectations of how many marriage proposals you’d receive before the age of 21.
Such victimisation is what I thought Laura Piani’s debut film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life would be about: a woman with standards so high that they must be brought back down to earth in whimsical rom-com style. Instead, it’s about an amateur writer with writer’s block, her brief situationship with her emotionally unavailable best friend and her unlikely (i.e. predictable) romance with Jane Austen’s great, great, great, great nephew who thinks his famous ancestor’s work is “overrated”.
Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is a literature fiend who works at Shakespeare and Company, a famous English-language bookshop in Paris. She’s also a budding romance writer cursed with an inability to finish any of the stories she starts. By day, she daydreams about a pining Austen leading man coming to his senses and realising that a woman who works in a bookshop is The One. By night, she dines alone at her local Chinese restaurant and imagines falling in love with the naked illustrated man at the bottom of her sake cup. Who among us hasn’t.
Frustrated by Agathe’s inertia, her best friend and coworker Felix (Pablo Pauly) sends the first few chapters of her latest unfinished story to the Jane Austen Residency, a two-week writer’s retreat that will hopefully pull Agathe out of her self-imposed hole. With much encouragement (force) she goes and there she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), the most English looking man you’ve ever seen and the descendent of her literature idol. For the remainder of the film’s 98 minutes we get some light courtship and some charmless banter, the likes of which Jane Austen would probably not bother writing down.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a ‘nice’ film; it is unlikely to offend anyone but neither is it likely to become someone’s favourite comfort movie à la Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice or Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility or the Gwynny Emma (I prefer the Romola Garai/Jonny Lee Miller miniseries myself). There are some nice moments of levity - Agathe accidentally full frontal exposing herself to Oliver comes to mind - but it is severely lacking in yearning and chewy insights on how our romantic expectations have been influenced by the media we consume.
A poster quote calls it “a tantalising love-triangle that Austen herself would be proud of” but I must respectfully disagree. When the credits rolled in Woody Allen font, I found myself with a hankering to rewatch one of his films instead.
Verdict
☆☆½
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is in cinemas now. But Pride & Prejudice is on Netflix, just sayin’.
Dangerous Animals — Sean Byrne
Where I live (Western Australia), you’re statistically more likely to be gobbled up by a great white shark than to have a distinguished English gentleman fall in love with you. And it’s this definitely true stat that Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones) taps into with his new shark-based serial killer film Dangerous Animals.
The film stars Jai Courtney as Tucker, the spiritual lovechild of Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor and Jaws’ Quint. Tucker’s a classic Aussie bloke whose second favourite pastime is fishing; unfortunately, his first is kidnapping people who won’t be missed (i.e. English and American tourists visiting Surfers Paradise), imprisoning them in the bowels of his trawler and hoisting them up and over the side as live bait for his favourite animals: sharks.
You see, Tucker had a run-in with a great white as a child and narrowly escaped the jaws of death with a gnarly scar, and this has given him a profound fascination with these apex predators of the sea. So enamoured with the biggest of fishes is he that he films his victims’ deaths on VHS and watches them back later. It’s “the greatest show on earth” he says and as a physical media enthusiast, I support his passion for tangible entertainment. And in Tucker’s defense, if you’re dumb enough to board a dodgy looking boat with ‘Tucker’s Experience’ scrawled across it in Indiana Jones/Craft Decor font, you kinda deserve to face trial by shark.
One such tourist who would never fall for such a blatantly off-the-books venture is final girl Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American surfer and drifter who’s in town to catch waves and steal Ben & Jerry’s from servos. She meets local real estate fuckboy Moses (Josh Heuston), who’s not a fuckboy at all but an old school romantic intent on breaking down Zephyr’s walls. Unfortunately, their fling is cut short when Zephyr asks the wrong person for a fin key for her board and finds herself as Tucker’s next chum.
Dangerous Animals was filmed in Queensland and if you were in any doubt of its Australianness, Jai Courtney’s here to remind you by eating Nutri-Grain and dancing in his jocks to AusRock classics like Stevie Wright’s ‘Evie’. His performance is the best part of the film and I thoroughly enjoyed his physicality, expressiveness and overall sense of fun in inhabiting his role.
Hassie Harrison, too, is convincing and energetic as Zephyr, a hard as nails survivor who ain’t afraid of no shark. She takes the archetype of female surfy badass established with Blake Lively’s character in The Shallows and adds another level of determination that makes some of her character’s actions in the second part of the film more buyable. I only wish Byrne focused more on the dynamic between Zephyr and Tucker than he does on the unnecessary romantic subplot; it does a bit of a disservice to Harrison’s character and takes away some of the cat-and-mouse terror.
What surprised me about Dangerous Animals was its tameness, especially after hearing internet talk of its brutality and insufficient rating. The film very much poses Tucker as the monster rather than the sharks and while that’s a responsible thing to do, it does slightly diminish the primal horror of being eaten by big fucking animal with rows of massive teeth.
The film also asks its viewers to suspend a lot of disbelief and even for a survival horror movie, there are several moments that made me scoff. There’s shark behaviour that I do not buy for a second, protagonist abilities that seemingly come out of nowhere and escalate quite quickly and an ending that goes on a few beats too long. And perhaps most disappointing of all, it’s not that scary, especially compared to some of the SharkSmart notifications I have popping up on my phone from November to April each year.
All in all, Dangerous Animals is a pretty fun, bitey film to see in winter when your chances of getting wrecked by a six metre monster are lowest.
Verdict
☆☆☆
Dangerous Animals is in cinemas now. Wear shark repellent.
Materialists — Celine Song
The Beatles said “all you need is love.”
Madonna said “we are living in a material world and I am a material girl.”
This means that one of the most prolific musical acts of our time lied. Your current socioeconomic standing may determine who you believe.
It’s this sobering, even cynical realisation that lies at the centre of Materialists, the much-awaited sophomore feature from playwright-turned-director Celine Song. Like her previous film Past Lives (and strangely, her husband Justin Kuritzkes’ previous screenplay for Challengers), Materialists features a woman, two men and the strongest shape of all, the love triangle. The film’s trailer made it look a bit like Hitch with an extra person, so while I had high hopes, I entered with caution.
The film stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York matchmaker responsible for nine marriages. She works for Adore, a matchmaking firm where a successful client relationship is celebrated like a deal well brokered or a property sold above asking price. Lucy is one of the firm’s finest because her math always checks out; using metrics like height, attractiveness, salary, family background and political leaning, she determines a person’s value and always manages to facilitate roughly equal value matches.
It’s this practicality and lack of sentimentality that attracts Harry (Pedro Pascal), a stupidly rich and stupidly handsome financier whom she meets at the wedding of her latest successful match. But at the same time as this perfect-on-paper prospect enters Lucy’s life, so too does her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor and waiter whom she left because love wasn’t worth the financial struggle. Truths about modern dating will be uncovered and “broke men propaganda” (as one Letterboxd review put it) will ultimately win out.
Shot on 35mm by Past Lives cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, there is a quality and beauty to the film that elevates it above your standard Netflix rom-com. There’s also an unexpected hint of authenticity in the fact that Celine Song did actually work as a matchmaker in New York for six months, saying she “learned more about human beings in those six months…than in any other part of my life.” Indeed one of the highlights of the film is the wildly entitled and unrealistic expectations from Lucy’s clients that echo some of the opinions I’ve seen from both men and women in social media comments sections. And fair enough; it seems like it’s a shitshow out there.
What I enjoy most about the film is its exploration of modern partnership and marriage and its initial assertion that love will only get you so far. As Lucy says, marriage has historically always been a business transaction and as depressing as it sounds, she’s right. And she’s still right.
If you’re a woman, marriage is still the quickest, easiest way to go up a few rungs on the socioeconomic ladder and upgrade your lifestyle. As a child of divorce who spent childhood through to adulthood in countless rentals, whose own parents had to wait until their 50s to scrape up enough cash for their house deposits and who wouldn’t myself own property were it not for marriage, I appreciate the frankness that Lucy offers to her female clients. It’s all the more important when you consider the inherent financial risks of choosing the wrong partner, especially in a climate where the cost of housing, living and divorces are through the roof.
It’s refreshing that a film like this - with a director like Song and the backing of A24 - can get a proper cinema release. I only wish it hit as hard as the director’s previous film.
Past Lives ranked in the second to highest spot in my Top 10 of 2023 list (losing only to Aftersun) because it had ideas about who we are in relationships and it explored them with a tenderness and thoughtfulness that made me ugly cry. Materialists lacks the intimacy and emotional resonance of its predecessor; as I feared after watching the trailer, it kinda is just Hitch made by more talented people.
There are some strange narrative choices that alter the film’s tone and I’m not sure they’re handled as deftly as they could be. And for a film that stars such attractive people, I didn’t find there to be much chemistry or heat between them – a big problem for a rom-com or romantic drama. It’s hard to say whether that’s down to the cast themselves or their fame being a distraction, but the result is the same. Still, I do love Dakota Johnson and I think she’s wonderful here as a modern-day Emma whose overreliance on surface level valuations threatens to undo her life and career.
For me, Materialists is not going to join the ranks of When Harry Met Sally or Pride & Prejudice or Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight as an example of great cinema romance. But Past Lives probably will, so that’s still a win for Celine Song.
Verdict
☆☆☆½
Materialists is in cinemas now. Take your boyfriends.
Next week’s cinematic lineup is decidedly less lovey dovey or sharky but there is more horror in store with Danny Boyle/Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later and David Cronenberg’s latest The Shrouds. I’m hoping Joseph Kosinski does for cars in F1 what he did for planes in Top Gun: Maverick, so stay tuned to see if Brad Pitt feels the need for speed.
