Perhaps only the French could get away with a Jane Austen rom-com riff like “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.” It’s slight and predictable, with featherweight jokes and a whiff of “Why’d she choose HIM?”

But title it “Jane Austen a gâché ma vie,” film it in French (with subtitles) and English, build it around a clerk in perhaps the most famous bookstore in Paris (Shakespeare and Company) if not the world, and it takes on a certain je nais se quios, just enough of it to make up the fact that they’ve rubbed all the edges off “Austenesque” in the process.

No, tossing in a touch of Euro nudity doesn’twholly atone for that.

Camille Rutherford of “Blue is the Warmest Color” is Agathe, a bookseller in the most poetic setting such people can thrive in, a frustrated writer with personal phobias and an ongoing flirtation with co-worker Felix (Pablo Pauly of “The French Dispatch”), complicated but comfy suburban living arrangements with her single-mom sister and one frustrated ambition.

She’d like to be a published writer herself, a romance novelist more on the Austen end of the spectrum than the Nicholas Sparks one.

Helpful Felix has pooh-pooh’d her writer’s block and submitted the promising beginning to her latest work to the Brits who should know talent. She’s awarded a Jane Austen Writer’s Residency at the Austen house.

Not much is made of the house, the location or the fact that this is a real thing and there are often groups of promising or even accomplished writers briefly residing there looking for “inspiration.” All we know is it’s in the UK, that Agathe has a phobia about cars (she bike-commutes to work) and that her grudgingly undertaken trip includes a ferry ride, which ends with her picked up in the least safe car imaginable — an unreliable 1960s MGB.

Charlie Anson plays the “great great great nephew” of Empire waistline Austen, Oliver, a snobby Oxford “contemporary literature” prof who drives and runs errands for his aged parents (Liz Crowther and Alan Fairbairn) who are the “real” Austen authorities and keepers of the flame.

Pity about Dear Old Dad’s forgetting to wear pants. Or underpants. Cute, though.

As Oliver is set up as a haughty Mr. Darcy and Felix takes on the role of the less suitable suitor, the one who wants to get her over her “imposter syndrome” (“I’m not a REAL writer!”), we hunt about for events, clashes — the assorted writers-in-residence include thriller novelists and a feminist/Marxist critic — that will enliven them en route to the “autumn ball” that the residency throws for the writers and locals, in “Pride & Prejudice/Sense and Sensibility” wear.

Agathe, whose father was a Brit, may be “looking for a Mark Darcy,” Felix teases. But she sees herself as Anne Elliott, the mousy “spinster” heroine of Austen’s “Persuasion.” The shallow Felix is her idea of “Henry Crawford of ‘Mansfield Park,'” opportunistic and perhaps out of the running for life partner.

Or perhaps not.

The limited locations sparkle, and the gags set up Agathe as out-of-her-depth hapless in some predictable (opening the wrong door while nude) and offbeat (spat on by llamas) ways.

Writer-director Laura Piani has made a frustrating film in that it mocks the idea of adding life experiences in order to become a writer, when plainly Agathe is doing just that. She makes a murk of the mimicked Austen romance formula. The stakes in all of this are low, and the resolution abrupt in ways that suck some of the romance right out of it.

But Rutherford is engaging, Pauly and Anson likeable “types” and the settings lush and Austenesque.

And it’s just French enough to feel novel, after decades of Austen adaptations, biographies and the like, a “fresh take” that isn’t all that but does no shame to its titular novelist and the iconic bookseller who figures she “wrecked my life.”

Rating: R, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, Liz Crowther,
Annabelle Lengronne and Alan Fairbairn.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Piani. A Sony Pictures Classic release.

Running time: 1:38