Producer: Gabrielle Dumon   Director: Laura Piani   Screenplay: Laura Piani   Cast: Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, Annabelle Lengronne, Liz Crowther, Alan Fairbairn, Lola Peploe, Alice Butaud, Roman Angel, Laurence Pierre, Alyzée Soudet, Rodrigue Pouvin, Nina Hédin, Pierre-François Garel and Frederick Wiseman   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B-

The title suggests that Laura Piani’s feature debut might be designed to upend the conventions—some might say clichés—in Jane Austen’s novels, but in fact “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” which earns its double-language title from the fact that its characters slip back and forth between French and English, winds up basically conforming to them.  That’s okay, of course, though one might wish it did so a bit more cleverly.

The life in question is that of Agathe Robinson (engaging Camille Rutherford), who works at Paris’ famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company.  She’s an aspiring writer, though unable to finish any of her stories, and is criticized by her writing teacher for concentrating on producing cheap romance novels.  As to her life, she’s single, living in a small apartment with her sister Mona (Alice Butaud) and Mona’s young son Tom (Roman Angel).  Mona’s a free-spirited sort: she can’t even be bothered to remember the name of the fellow (Pierre-François Garel) she’s shared her bed with the previous night with and brings to the breakfast table—it’s not Gabriel but Raphael, or is it the other way around?

Agathe’s personal life, on the other hand, is more staid.   Frisky Félix (Pablo Pauly), her fellow clerk, flirts with her, but he’s a compulsive womanizer, and she adheres to a higher idea of romance.  But she realizes that, as with her writing hopes, her opportunities might be fading.  When Félix asks her which Austen heroine she identifies with, she says Anne Elliot from “Persuasion,” who, to paraphrase Oscar Hammerstein, let her golden chances pass her by when she broke off her engagement to Captain Wentworth.  She’s also, we’ll eventually learn, hobbled by trauma: her parents were killed in a car accident in which she was only injured, and she bears both grief and a measure of undeserved guilt.

Both she and Félix soldier on in their own ways, however; she’s suddenly inspired to begin a novel in English about a sultry dream she had while eating alone in a Chinese restaurant, and when Félix surreptitiously reads the beginning chapter, he secretly puts in an application for her at a Jane Austen Writers’ Residency in England, where she’d have the opportunity to devote herself to the book.  Naturally she’s accepted, and after some hemming and hawing is induced to go.

There she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson), Austen’s great-great-great-grandnephew, who’s reluctantly assumed responsibility for running the program started by his father Todd (Alan Fairbairn) and mother Beth (Liz Crowther); Todd is showing signs of dementia, and Beth, while utterly committed, is getting on.  So Oliver has stepped into the breach, though his heart isn’t in it.

At first Agathe and Oliver don’t hit it off at all; indeed, stepping off the ferry she almost immediately throws up on his shoes when she sees his car (she has a phobia about riding in them).   It doesn’t help that she loves Austen and he’s a university professor specializing in modern literature who disparages his ancestor’s books.  But of course the chilliness dissipates over time, even after Agathe blunders naked into his room in a scene worthy of a French bedroom farce, and they find themselves falling in love—until Félix shows up unexpectedly, announces he’s a changed man in love with Agathe, and takes her home.  Of course, if you know your Austen, you know that resolution won’t stand.

There are plenty of good things in the film.  Rutherford, pretty in an unconventional way, makes a heroine who’s easy to root for, often awkward but obviously intelligent, even if her writer’s block persists through the whole residency (it will finally be broken only after she returns to her parents’ house and faces her grief).  Pauly can be irritatingly pushy but shows he has a good heart after all, and Anson makes a likable Darcy surrogate, his pomposity gradually giving way to doe-eyed devotion.  Fairbairn and Crowther are delightful, though his wide-eyed eccentricities become a bit much.  And a couple of the other writers-in-residence—Annabelle Lengronne as Chéryl, who has a knack for fortune-telling that proves prophetic, and Lola Peploe as Olympia, an opinionated woman whom Agathe comforts at a crucial moment—have moments in the sun.  Young Angel does as well.  And it’s a nice touch to feature documentarian Frederick Wiseman in a cameo at the close.

The picture is attractive to look at, too.  The locations, both in France and in the “English” settings (recreated on the continent, it seems) are quite lovely, and Agnès Sery’s production design makes the Austen house a place one might like to visit. Costumer Flore Vauville’s work is overall fine, but especially impressive in a “ballroom” scene toward the close, where Piani stages a cheeky pas de trois.  Cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer makes even the more claustrophobic sets work fairly well (the opening scenes, notably, were actually shot at Shakespeare & Company), while editor Floriane Allier has kept the running-time under a hundred minutes.  Peter Von Poehl’s original music evinces a suitably longing tone, but it might be time for French filmmakers to stop resorting to Schubert piano music whenever they’re after soulful melancholy.  It’s become rather a cliché.

Piani’s debut reflects the spirit of an Austen novel without simply resorting to clumsy mimicry.  The result is pleasantly familiar but with a distinctive spin. 

Producers: Craig Perry, Sheila Hanahan Taylor, Jon Watts, Dianne McGunigle and Toby Emmerich   Directors: Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky   Screenplay: Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor   Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon, Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore, Rya Kihlstedt, Alex Zahara,  Brec Bassinger, Gabrielle Rose, Max Lloyd-Jones, Tinpo Lee, April Telek, Jayden Oniah, Natasha Burnett, Bernard Cuffling, Travis Turner, Noah Bromley, Brenna Llewellyn and Tony Todd   Distributor: New Line/Warner Bros.

Grade: B-

It’s never a good idea to get emotionally invested in any of the characters in a “Final Destination” movie, since pretty much all of them are marked for death.  But for the makers of the franchise it’s proven a profitable financial investment indeed, encompassing five solidly-grossing entries between 2000 and 2011 before being put on hiatus until now.

“Bloodlines” represents a tweaking of the series’ premise to add plenty of potential new victims beyond those who have actually “cheated” death by escaping some mass casualty event through a premonition of the upcoming disaster.  The addendum is that all those biologically descended from the escapees become targets of the Grim Reaper too, to be dealt with seriatim, according to the order in which their ancestors would have perished, and always in the gruesomely inventive fashions that have become de rigueur according to the established formula.

The movie begins with a spectacular set piece that depicts the disaster that never happened, which would have been caused by a literal bad penny.  The locale is an observation-deck restaurant perched atop a tall tower in some unidentified city in the late sixties.  Iris (Brec Bassinger) is surprised when her beau Paul Campbell (Mac Lloyd-Jones) squires her to its opening night, and though the snooty maitre’d (Bernard Cuffling) refuses to recognize their reservation, the couple has a pretty good time, especially since Paul takes the occasion to propose.

Unfortunately an obnoxious kid (Noah Bromley) intends to drop a penny he swiped from the place’s fountain off the tower even though a guard has told him not to.  When the boy ignores him, Iris takes the coin away, but during their struggle it’s thrown into the machinery that keeps the restaurant operational, with potentially catastrophic results that Iris foresees and warns the crowd about—ineffectually.  We watch the collapse of the structure, with fire engulfing the place as people try to escape, some falling to their deaths below.  (One in a series of clever needle drops is inserted as the valet parkers run from bodies crashing onto the pavement.)  The obnoxious penny-throwing kid meets an especially satisfying fate.

In reality, though, Iris’ announcement led to a panicked evacuation that averted what we’ve just seen.  But, as the franchise has taught us, death will not allow such a harvest of souls to be stolen from him.  He begins to stalk not only those who would have died in the order in which they would have met their demises, but their offspring and grandkids before moving on to the next victim. 

We come to know this because college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is terrified by a recurrent nightmare of Iris’ vision, which she begins to investigate. To do that, she has to find out about her maternal grandmother Iris Campbell, but her father Marty (Tinpo Lee) warns her against it, and her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) is dismissive; both are still angry that Marty’s wife Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Iris’ daughter, had abandoned the family years before.  Stefani nonetheless approaches her uncle Howard (Alex Zahara), Darlene’s older brother, for information, and though he’s unresponsive, his wife Brenda (April Telek) gives her a lead to Iris’ whereabouts, a monstrous death-proofed enclave where the old woman has lived for years, assiduously collecting data about the myriad others who’d been at the Sky View with her and have perished over the years, along with their children, from oldest to youngest, and grandchildren, also by age. 

Stefani is initially creeped out by Iris, but comes to believe her ravings as a result of what happens to Iris when she ventures outside her sanctuary, and then the tragedy that befalls her first-born, Howard.  Thus begins the series of imaginatively gruesome deaths in the family devised by writers Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor and staged with panache by directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky (with considerable help from their effects crew and prosthetics department, of course).  Stefani’s aim is to find a way to save her cousins Erik (Richard Harmon), Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) and Julia (Anna Lore), as well as her mother, who returns for Iris’ funeral, as well as herself and Charlie.  But that proves easier said than done; even a visit to William Bludworth (Tony Todd), the grown-up version of the young boy (Jayden Oniah) Iris had rescued in her premonition who’s somehow managed to survive to old age, suggests only a couple of ways out.

The premise behind the “Final Destination” franchise was always a good one; the idea of an unseen death force exhibiting cleverness and a grim sense of humor in effecting the deaths of his chosen ones carries a nasty charge, and even when the writers of some earlier installments failed to employ it to best advantage it continued to resonate.  Busick and Taylor toy with it expertly—a backyard barbecue sequence is filled with cheeky feints before the axe falls, and a couple of twists regarding the Campbell cousins (as well as more spot-on needle drops added to Tim Wynn’s score) adds to the outrageously jokey tone.  The return of the penny at the close is also a nifty touch. 

To be sure, the acting is variable, ranging from adequate to amateurish, but given the fact that this is just a mid-level picture in budgetary terms, the directors, production designer Rachel O’Toole, cinematographer Christian Sebaldt, editor Sabrina Pine and the effects and makeup teams have succeeded in making it look a more expensive product than it actually is; that opening atop the Sky View is actually pretty stunning, an improvement on the similar one in the recent “Drop,” and another big disaster at the close is an effective capper.   And, of course, it’s a bonus to have a valedictory turn by Todd, a veteran of the franchise, who looks very ill but uses that physical infirmity to deepen his cameo.

No “Final Destination” movie is ever going to be a deep cinematic masterpiece about death; if that’s what you’re after, search out “The Seventh Seal.”  But this is the cream of the crop in a generally disreputable genre, and even viewers who usually avoid such gory-but-funny death flicks (which, after all, are basically exercises in sadism) might find it worth taking a chance on. 

And may one suggest that if another installment is in order, could we see what actually befalls that nasty penny-pitching boy and his descendants?