Marie-Antoinette in Film

http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Review+Adieux+Reine/6784011/story.html
MONTREAL - Léa Seydoux, Diane Kruger and Virginie Ledoyen are gorgeous in Les Adieux à la Reine. But that you already guessed for the very simple reason that Seydoux, Kruger and Ledoyen are always gorgeous.

And this film chronicling life at Versailles right smack in the midst of the French Revolution is also gorgeous and not just thanks to the three stunning actresses. Co-writer and director Benoît Jacquot films the Royal court in all its pomp and majesty and he’s fond of eye-catching shots.

But the end result is curiously uninvolving. The goal, one presumes, is to showcase the drama of the last days of Louis XVI’s regime in all its tragedy, but there is a strange detachment to the way Jacquot and co-writer Gilles Taurand chronicle this fin du régime (in their adaptation of the award-winning 2002 Chantal Thomas novel).

The film, which opened the Berlin Film Festival this past February, covers this historical event through the eyes of one young woman, Sidonie Laborde (Seydoux). She’s is the queen’s reader – who has the rather unusual job of reading books to amuse Marie Antoinette (Kruger). And she’s a big fan of Marie Antoinette. In fact, it kind of looks like she’s in love with Louis XVI’s Austrian wife.

There is quite the sensual scene right at the beginning when the two women are lying in bed together with their faces just inches apart, and one of the odd wrinkles of this new take on these oft-covered events is that Jacquot focuses almost exclusively on the sensuality of the three main women here, Marie Antoinette, Sidonie and Gabrielle de Polignac (Ledoyen), a duchess who is the object of Marie Antoinette’s really quite obsessive affections.

Most everyone at Versailles goes into a panic when word filters back from central Paris that armed insurrectionists have stormed the Bastille. Most everyone except Marie-Antoinette that is. We don’t hear her mentioning anything about letting the peasants eat cake mainly because she’s still worrying about the state of her relationship with the duchess.

Sidonie becomes the go-between, bringing a message from the queen to the woman she adores, which puts the young admirer of the queen in an awkward spot.

Trouble is that everything remains on the surface here. Jacquot is so busy filming these three luminous actresses in the best possible light at the best possible angle that he forgets that even head-turning beauties could use some intelligent dialogue. There’s no particular insight into the French Revolution to be gleaned from this shallow drama. In fact, Louis XVI (Xavier Beauvois) basically makes a cameo appearance.

Jacquot does do a good job of capturing the mood of an aristocracy on its last legs, but he’s much less successful in bringing the story of these three women to life. Seydoux is really quite extraordinary as the idealistic servant to the queen, perfectly conveying the rush of mixed emotions messing her up, and Kruger is even better as Marie Antoinette. She has the distracted queen thing down-pat. But sadly, Ledoyen doesn’t have much to work with in this thinly-written role.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Review+Adieux+Reine/6784011/story.html#ixzz1xtj3FRat

Elena wrote: For one thing, the court was mourning the Dauphin. Everyone, including Madame de Polignac, was in mourning clothes, not bright green gowns.

Elena wrote:Gabrielle de Polastron, Duchesse de Polignac, also referred to as “Yolande,” is usually portrayed in books and films as Marie-Antoinette’s “bad girl” friend, responsible for leading the young queen of France into a wild, decadent lifestyle. Often depicted as a greedy, spendthrift slut, Gabrielle preferred simplicity, was a devoted mother and loyal friend of both Louis and Antoinette. Part of the rehabilitation of Marie-Antoinette’s reputation is a careful look at her relationship with Gabrielle.

Benoît Jacquot’s historical drama, about intrigue in the retinue of Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger) during the first days of the French Revolution, centers on Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), the Queen’s intellectually nimble but socially naïve young reader, who, like everyone else at the court of Versailles, is looking for a means of escape ahead of the bloodthirsty hordes en route from Paris. The Queen herself spends the end of her reign obsessed with her needlepoint, her jewelry, and, above all, her relationship with Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), ostensibly a governess, whose reputation for sexual adventure sets the royal circle’s licentious tone and fuels its scandalous reputation. Jacquot gazes avidly at this closed-in world of women; if his camera pressed any closer to them, it would be subcutaneous. The director and his actresses achieve a fevered intimacy—their urgent whispering is matched by his images of a tremulous immediacy. As the household of confectionary manners and tightrope-taut wiles of pleasure and power disperses, we witness the birth of Eurotrash. With Noémie Lvovsky, as Madame Campan, the Queen’s majordomo, who has the cold and commanding insight of a modern-day C.E.O. In French.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/farewell_my_queen_jacquot#ixzz1zZcsbUX8

For those interested in factual history, this is probably not the movie for you. To begin with, Sidonie, is a fictional character, and the whole ‘behind the scenes’ of Marie Antoinette’s more than friendly love for la Duchesse de Polignac is the center and all of this movie.

If Sidonie is unlikeable- the same is even truer for Marie Antoinette, played by Diane Kruger. The French queen is portrayed as malignantly as she was in the ‘libelles’ of the time. Her role seems fitting to the rumours concocted about her. Her homosexual preference for la Duchesse is the only focal point of the movie. And, unfortunately, there is nothing charismatic or endearing about this self-serving Marie Antoinette.
http://www.historyandwomen.com/2012/07/movie-review-les-adieux-la-reine.html