Gwyneth Paltrow swaps the incense for incest in this 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel about a spoiled white woman spouting bad lifestyle advice and lauding her privilege over everyone she meets.

Douglas McGrath’s Emma may not have the sartorial or cultural currency of the previous year’s Clueless, but is no less modern or quotable. If anything the rom-com’s faithfulness to the period setting and original dialogue only emphasises Austen’s modernity, bringing out the social satire and casual bitchiness inherent in the 200-year-old source material. Where the genre too often confines its shallow conversations to stuffy locations, McGrath stages campy performances in constantly fresh settings that wittily frame Austen’s evergreen characters.

The low-stakes story centres around Emma’s well-meaning if patronising meddling in her social circle’s love lives, while remaining clueless about her own romantic feelings for her surrogate brother (Jeremy Northam). And the cast is Emmaculate, led by a lofty yet likeable turn from Paltrow as the self-appointed matchmaker and tastemaker of high society; the perfect role for the actor who once said, “I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year”, and described her ex (sorry, “consciously uncoupled”) husband Chris Martin as “like my brother.”

Though she lacks the charisma to carry the film alone, Paltrow is helpfully surrounded by uniformly funny performances from Toni Colette as the slow-on-the-uptake Harriet Smith, Alan Cumming as the spineless Mr Elton, and Juliet Stevenson as the original humblebragger Mrs Elton. In dramatic terms the movie is content to coast for an undemanding couple of hours, but its laugh-out-loud line readings are liable to do more rib damage than Gwyneth Paltrow on a ski slope.