Movie: Farewell My Queen

"Farewell My Queen": Movie about Queen Marie Antoinette during the storming of the Bastille
http://sssnewsandnotes.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/movie-farewell-my-queen-les-adieux-a-la-reine/

Another review, here: http://marie-antoinettequeenoffrance.blogspot.com/2012/08/farewell-my-queen-movie-review.html

We only get a glimpse into Versailles during the course of a few short days in this film. Each day we wake up with Sidonie and follow her throughout her daily routine. Routine is disrupted by the beginnings of the Revolution. I loved the costumes, scenery, architecture, hair, and make up. The film stays inside the walls of Versailles (mainly) because Sidonie does not leave. So, while you do not get to see the events outside of Versailles, you do get to see the chaos spread and stirred throughout the palace. It feels like an inside peek into what people were saying, how gossip was spread within palace walls, and how people reacted.

(Read entire review: http://marie-antoinettequeenoffrance.blogspot.com/2012/08/farewell-my-queen-movie-review.html)

Here is a review by Theodore Harvey:

http://www.royaltymonarchy.com/movies.html

Farewell, My Queen (2012)
As a French-speaking but visibly foreign German surrounded by French actors and actresses who is the same age as the real Queen at the time of the Revolution, Diane Kruger was an inspired (and apparently sincere) choice for the role of Marie Antoinette, and royalists will find the loyalty of her fictional servant Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) touching. However the film makes too much of Marie Antoinette's friendship with Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) and too little of the Queen's by-then-deepened sense of religious, maternal, and political duty, with the King (Xavier Beauvois) reduced to a nonentity, as if nothing had changed since the early years of their marriage. It's hard to go wrong with the set when one has been allowed to film at Versailles, but the film overall is rather forgettable as royal period dramas go.

I finally got around to watching Les Adieux La Reine. As a rule, I agree with the reviews that have already been posted: it ranks as a 'meh' on the entertainment scale. Its characterization was shoddy at best, and I'm not quite sure if the writers knew who their target audience was. All the interviews, including one with Diane Kruger herself, make a great show of how they intended to restore the queen's reputation and contribute to mending the extravagant way she is popularly perceived.

All very well and fine, but with that as your teaser your audience is going to be royalist. Great, wonderful, go where the money is, I'm a capitalist despite all evidence to the contrary (see my signature): but then you had better actually mend her reputation. Instead I saw the most spiteful of self-important shrews strut herself across my screen and I couldn't help but think, "Don't worry. She'll get hers in 1793" which is the exact opposite of what I should be thinking. She's ---- ugh, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

The servant-girl protagonist has a blind adulation for her queen, which is all very well and fine and could easily be a literary device employed to flatter Antoinette. After all, why would someone feel such devotion towards someone undeserving? I don't know, but that doesn't stop our rather flat protagonist from desperately trying to meet Antoinette's expectations, her devotion even culminating in risking her life at the pike of the mob in order to protect her queen's happiness with her apparently-lesbian lover (because those pamphlets published about her sexual exploits, totally 100% true, and you gotta show in your movie how Antoinette didn't really love ~dumpy old Louis if you're going to restore her reputation, mmmmhmmmm). Antoinette manipulates our protagonist, using her love for her own gain with absolutely no inhibition or even a flash of gratitude. As I typed this I couldn't help but wonder - and I don't know how to phrase this - whether the writers were maybe trying to insult their audience. Almost a "Yes, this is historically accurate Antoinette. You may love her, you may adore her, but look at how she'd treat you if you actually met her!"

Greeeaaaatttt. I don't like movies that insult their audience. It had its pros, of course: I liked the upstairs-downstairs atmosphere and how the Revolution's progress slowly trickles through the ranks of the servants. But that isn't enough to save the movie, truly. Its plot pivots on the love our protagonist holds for Antoinette, and since the protagonist's motives are unexplored and Antoinette's motives ("I want to sleep with Lamballe!") are superficial even its story crumples flat...

Thanks for your thoughts on this!!!