Brow Beat

Watch the Delightful Trailer for Whit Stillman’s Sundance Hit Love and Friendship

The Jane Austen adaptation machine rolls on apace, with a trailer out for Whit Stillman’s new movie Love and Friendship, based on an early novella called Lady Susan that went unpublished until decades after the author’s death. The film stars Kate Beckinsale as that titular protagonist, a bewitchingly poisonous widow trying to marry off her daughter to a rich doofus, while Chloë Sevigny plays her best friend, Alicia. (This is a reunion, of sorts: Beckinsale and Sevigny teamed up previously, in 1998, for Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco.)

The trailer offers a handful of genuinely hilarious moments from Tom Bennett as Sir James Martin (apparently he’s never seen peas before), as well as Beckingsale delivering pert Austenian judgments with a disarming smile. Whether Stillman will embellish the famously decorous writer’s innuendo with steamy frock-tearing action remains to be seen, but audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival were reportedly quite pleased. It’s slated for release on May 16.