When Lady Susan leaves her own impoverished Vernon estate, Longford, and goes to visit the rich and coveted DeCourcy family at their fabulous country house, Churchill, the cast multiplies. This is all fine as long as you don’t care about the wafer-thin plot (or absence thereof) and myriad characters too vast to keep straight, played by British actors you’ve never heard of. Stillman’s film The Last Days of Disco, are reunited here with delicious scheming. Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny, who played roommates in Mr. Alicia Johnson, an exiled American from Connecticut, at her side, Lady Susan shuffles her possibilities like a deck of cards in a game of gin rummy, the two of them gossiping and chatting away as every eligible man and friendly woman they meet pass across the landscape of their plot like trusted innocents, waiting to be duped. The source of his screenplay is an unfinished, unpublished Jane Austen novella, Lady Susan, about the foibles and follies of Lady Susan Vernon (beautifully played by Kate Beckinsale with a calculating guile masked by forced sincerity), a beautiful widow who, left in embarrassing financial straits by her late husband, leaves no stone unturned in her quest for a rich new husband for herself and her daughter Frederica. Starring: Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny and Xavier Samuel
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