Whit Stillman’s “Love & Friendship”: Subverting the Social Order with Style

One of the reasons why Whit Stillman’s new film, “Love & Friendship,” is so deeply satisfying is that he filmed it on his home turf. “Love & Friendship,” an adaptation of an early novel by Jane Austen that was published only posthumously (in 1871), is set in London and on rural English estates in the early nineteenth century. Stillman is not English and not two hundred years old, but his home turf is the realm of style, and the formalities and conventions of pre-industrial and aristocratic England—as they can be gleaned from books, images, and studies—are the movie’s very substance.