What if Nora Ephron had been French?

The literary references that abound in thedebut The French filmmaker Laura Piani's works may be misleading, but one quickly senses an influence that goes beyond Jane Austen's novels: the romantic comedies of Nora Ephron. The opening scene, in which a romantic, literary-wounded bookseller played by Camille Rutherford performs a dance as clumsy as it is charming among the crowded shelves of the bookstore where she works, allows the protagonist to connect with the characteristic female archetype that, in Ephron's films, was embodied by Meg Ryan: young women who fit in with the times they live in.

Agathe, the bookseller who is afraid of everything (writing, loving, living) and who would have preferred to have been born in the era of the heroines of Sanity and feeling Instead of the one from the dating apps, it could be a contemporary and French version of the protagonist of You've Got MailThe circle closes when we sense that, at its core, Ephron's work contains much of Jane Austen's stubborn and ingenious protagonists; also when we guess that the arrogant executive played by Tom Hanks in that film is, basically, a modern-day version of Mr. Darcy. Austenian, as is Oliver, the uptight literature professor and intermittent object of desire of the indecisive Agathe.

Piani's updates—the fluidity of female desire, which jumps freely from one romantic interest to another; the important role that writing plays in Agathe's personal growth—are welcome for a genre she approaches with just the right combination of devotion and irreverence, although a more openly comic approach, and with less substance, is missed (to the Ephron) regarding the typical ups and downs of any heterosexual relationship.