Frederica, too. As Lady Susan embarks on a controversial relationship with a married man, seduction, deception, broken hearts, and gossip all ensue. With a pitch-perfect Austenian sensibility, Stillman breathes new life into Austen's work, making it his own by adding original narration from a character comically loyal to the story's fiendishly manipulative heroine, Lady Susan." Filmmaking style Stillman wrote and directed three comedies of manners released in the 1990s: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and The Last Days of Disco (1998); he published a novel based on the last of these films. After completing his film trilogy, Stillman left independent comedy and started researching and writing a series of scripts set abroad. In August 1998 (shortly after The Last Days of Disco was released) he left his loft conversion in Manhattan's SoHo and moved to Paris. He returned to New York in 2010. A fourth film, Damsels in Distress, was released in 2011, premiering out of competition as the closing film at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. The Guardian in 2012 compared Stillman to Terrence Malick, another filmmaker who has "come to owe a good part of their mystique to the very paucity of their oeuvre...The lengthy gaps in between (films) have created expectations that are hard to fulfil, and admirers have been inclined to overestimate their achievement." A reviewer at Salon wrote that the reason for the long gaps between his films is that "Stillman is sometimes simply too damn smart for his own good. You can't always tell at whom he's poking fun, or why, and it becomes unfortunately easy to typecast him as the WASP answer to Woody Allen and conclude that his movies are insufferably irritating documents of privilege. He himself is aware of that possibility the whole time, and bastes his entire worldview in a rueful, ironic-romantic glaze." Stillman's effectiveness at the box-office has been mixed. He filmed Metropolitan for about $250,000, according to Stillman, with a box-office return of about $3 million. Barcelona was then filmed on a budget of under $3 million, returning just under $8 million. His third film was not a box-office success; its budget of $8 million returned about $3 million. Stillman, in an AOL interview following the twenty-fifth anniversary of Metropolitan, refers to himself as having been put into "director's prison" for more than 10 years before he made Damsels. His 2016 film Love & Friendship, a comedy based