Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Hearts and Heads

Antoinette (Diane Kruger) plays favorites in Farewell, My Queen


«««  Farewell, My Queen. Written by Benoît Jacquot & Gilles Taurand, based on the novel by Chantal Thomas. Directed by Benoît Jacquot.

One of the challenges of making historical fiction is knowing where to put the history and where the fiction. Too much of the former, and the story becomes a term paper; too much fiction, and the very premise of insight into the past is undermined. When it's done right, the genre can appear to transcend both history and fiction, putting sinews on dry facts, and giving mere characters and incidents the gravity of lived events. So how close does Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen come to the ideal?
             The film is about a well-worn subject: the last days of Queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Unlike Sophia Coppola's recent, much-maligned foray into the subject (Marie Antoinette--booed at Cannes in 2006), Jacquot's film tells the story not from the royal vantage, but through the eyes of a lowly servant, Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydou), the Queen's reader. If this were a war film, it would be called a "grunt's eye" view of battle.
            The conceit isn't exactly original, but it can be powerful. Like its heroine, the story is free to bow in and bow out of historical events, making us "flies on the wall" sometimes, and locked out at others, desperate for scraps of conversation heard through keyholes. Unlike Coppola, Jacquot needs not presume he knows what happened in the Hall of Mirrors on July 14, 1789--he needs only tell the story of what, for Sidonie, was a mostly ordinary day, albeit with ominous rumblings in the distance she is not equipped to understand.
            Jacquot works the device handily. Sidonie is as earnest a servant as she is unpolished, an expert in the Queen's literary tastes who can't keep help from tripping over her skirts on the palace's slippery floors. In her relatively brief scenes with Antoinette (Diane Kruger), we see she is no repressed prole, but deeply in love with her mistress. Meanwhile, Kruger plays the Queen not as a "let them eat cake" fashion victim, but as a slyly manipulative performer, a celebrity who pretends to be just another member of her own entourage. Her heart really belongs to Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), a minor noblewoman who might be even less popular with the people than the Queen herself. Sidonie is allowed to believe she shares her mistress' confidence, but she's in for a shock when the Queen reveals her true priority--to save "her" Polignac at any cost.
            Enjoying this film more or less demands you come to it knowing the historical context.  Anyone with a hazy grasp of the Revolution is likely to be frustrated by Jacquot's habit of following Sidonie on her mundane rounds. More literal-minded viewers might wish Jacquot had dropped the strict POV and just told Antoinette's story in straightforward bio-pic style. But of course, this is a French film, and these events are already so familiar to the French that a "straight" retelling would never do. This is not to say that its history is perfect: where Jacquot makes Antoinette's taste seem decidedly same-sex, the Queen actually spend much of her romantic passion on Count Axel von Fersen, a Swedish hunk who is never mentioned here.
            But there's no disputing that Queen is formidable both in conception and performance. Seydou is sad and lovely as she alternates between state apartments and the grim cells of the servant class, belonging entirely to neither. Diane Kruger, a German, seems like an odd choice to play the French queen, until we remember that Antoinette was actually an Austrian princess. Kruger is arguably too conventionally beautiful for the role, too Vogue to be plausibly royal. Yet her performance here is even better than her surprisingly good spy role in Inglorious Basterds. In Troy and Copying Beethoven she was feather-light. But like Antoinette herself, Kruger seems determined to prove we've underestimated her.  
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

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