In “Love & Friendship,” a Jane Austen adaptation directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale, the story of a woman’s self-liberation in a changing society becomes strangely, deeply personal. PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD WALSH / AMAZON STUDIOS / ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

One of the reasons why Whit Stillman’s new film, “Love & Friendship,” is so deeply satisfying is that he filmed it on his home turf. “Love & Friendship,” an adaptation of an early novel by Jane Austen that was published only posthumously (in 1871), is set in London and on rural English estates in the early nineteenth century. Stillman is not English and not two hundred years old, but his home turf is the realm of style, and the formalities and conventions of pre-industrial and aristocratic England—as they can be gleaned from books, images, and studies—are the movie’s very substance.

For Stillman, Austen’s England is like John Ford’s West—a place that Stillman had no personal experience of but that, in his idealizing cinematic reconstitution, embodies his crucial ideas. Just as Ford’s West was like Socrates’ city in speech, where the functions of government were still being defined and were being deployed locally, physically, dramatically—where the abstractions of modern bureaucracy were rendered tangible—Stillman’s Austenland is where the codes of society are well known and stringently enforced, where the hidden framework of punctilious rules and rigid norms is brought to the forefront and architecturally externalized, like a Beaubourg of mores.

With the strict and mighty edifice of social order rendered visible, Stillman, in “Love & Friendship,” brings his career-long big idea to a new pitch of specificity and clarity. For Stillman, style is a matter of submitting gracefully to the imperatives of society in order to achieve one’s personal goals and fulfill one’s own will nonetheless—a superficial submission that masks will with beauty, a mode of irony that’s not merely logical (Socratic style) but aesthetic. Stillman sees style as a way of coping gracefully with society’s rules and fulfilling illicit desires without violence or even disruption. He depicts style as a mask and mode of deception, and this deceit—and the willful ends that it achieves—doesn’t undercut the beauty of style but, rather, heightens it. “Love & Friendship” is, for Stillman, a story of a woman’s secret self-liberation in a society in which the burden of restrictions on women’s behavior is onerous.

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) is a young widow who has become the scandal of her set, accused of having an affair with Lord Manwaring, a nobleman who has separated from his wife. Lady Susan lacks money and a home of her own, and lives as a guest of friends and relations. She has placed her teen-age daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), in a boarding school that she can’t afford and plans to marry her off to Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett), a wealthy landowner and dunderhead, in order to secure Frederica’s fortunes as well as her own.

Lady Susan leaves the Manwarings to visit her brother-in-law, Charles Vernon (Justin Edwards), and his wife, Catherine, née DeCourcy (Emma Greenwell), at their estate, Churchill. Hearing of the arrival of the scandalous woman, Catherine’s brother, Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), a dashing and eligible young bachelor, shows up at Churchill to make her acquaintance. While Reginald’s family schemes to marry him off to Frederica, Lady Susan sets her own sights on him, and they engage in an intense flirtation, which his family vehemently opposes. Meanwhile, it isn’t entirely clear that she has given up Manwaring.

The style of “Love & Friendship” is comprehensive and ranges from the images and the dialogue through to the performances, the décor, and the costumes. Beckinsale displays a powerful sense of gesture; her poised head and precise gaze seem to divide and organize the space around her. She lends Lady Susan a sense of lightly borne self-mastery that matches her mastery of the rules of the social game that she’s compelled to play. The quietly imperious, deftly manipulative, secretly feared and despised young matron carries herself as if living life on a tightrope among onlookers who’d be eager to see her fall.

Stillman captures the ingrained force of an assimilated order in a quick succession of shots of door-knocks—one, by a servant on Reginald’s door, in which the servant, though unseen by any onlooker except the divine one, raises his hand outside Reginald’s door as if with self-conscious apology to himself and his God for disturbing the young lord’s tranquility. Moments later, Reginald heads over to Lady Susan’s room and raises his hand to knock on her door with decisively imperious authority. The texture and detail of the clothing emerge in such exquisite touches as a view of the variedly painted buttons on Reginald’s vest. The garments of the time and the social set are confining but highly ornamented, as if to ease necessity and personal discomfort with beauty and the sense of providing pleasure—mainly to others—along with pride in one’s own taste.

But it’s, above all, in the dramatic situations that Stillman derives from Austen’s epistolary novel, and in the powerful and pointed talk that he lends her characters, that the movie unleashes its intellectual power and emotional splendor. Lady Susan’s confidante throughout is her one true friend, Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), a character who is English in the novel but whom Stillman has turned into an American married to an Englishman. Alicia’s husband has banned her from seeing her scandalous friend—on pain of being sent home to Connecticut. (The wink is plain—that’s where Sevigny is from.) The shift of nationality gives Stillman a series of chances to riff on the American temperament and character in several sharp aphorisms—one in which Lady Susan enthuses about Alicia as an American “who has none of the uncouthness but all of the candor” of that young country, and another in which Lady Susan describes the colonists, who had only recently declared and won their independence, as “American ingrates” and adds that “only by having children can we understand the dynamic.”

The movie’s most effervescent dialogue is given to Sir James, a good-hearted fool whom Bennett plays with a wide-eyed simplicity and otter-like yelps of oblivious self-satisfaction that turn every verbal misstep into a glorious mental pratfall. Though the movie has only been out for a few days, Sir James’s naïvely delighted exclamation on seeing peas for the first time (“tiny green balls!”) is already a meme. He makes his appearance with the malaprop assumption that Churchill is “Church Hill,” and he squeezes the last drop of embarrassment out of this blunder and all those to come. Sir James’s every moment onscreen makes for a giddy series of comic interludes.

But Stillman has a bigger trick up his sleeve: he turns Sir James into an aristocratic Forrest Gump who reveals, in his ignorant innocence, the movie’s philosophical core. It depends on a Biblical riff that arises from Frederica’s refusal to marry Sir James. In despair, Lady Susan plays the religion card, citing what she calls the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” which, Lady Susan says, means that Frederica must obey her. First, Frederica consults the vicar about it. (The result is a brief but delicious riff on religious background that adds a fascinating touch to the character of Lady Susan.) Then the subject comes up again in the Vernons’ drawing room, where Sir James refers to the “Twelve Commandments.” Informed that there are only ten, Sir James gigglingly wonders which two to get rid of—and suggests those that refer solely to matters of form, such as honoring the Sabbath, because, he explains, the ones like “Thou shalt not kill” involve behavior that, he says, is simply wrong.