 |
| 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
No comments:
Post a Comment