Whit Stillman proved himself a dab hand at high-society comedy as long ago as 1990 with his brittle debut Metropolitan, an ensemble portrait of gilded Manhattan youth trying on adult attitudes for size. A couple more films followed, then a long silence until Damsels in Distress arrived, and underwhelmed, in 2011. I rather wish Stillman’s new one, Love & Friendship, had been his comeback film instead, for it recaptures all the charm of his first film and allies him with a writer who has been his spiritual avatar for years.

Based on an early epistolary novella, Lady Susan, by Jane Austen, the film is something quite new: a period comedy of manners that is both subtle and uproarious. It concerns the devious machinations of a widowed aristocrat, Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), as she tries to secure a rich husband for her teenage daughter and a married lord for herself. Her reputation precedes her, however, and the family of in-laws she visits are only too aware of the schemer in their midst. “Facts are horrid things,” Lady Susan remarks, and she will do all she can to twist and dissemble them into something more advantageous to herself.