You'd think that an ambitious French director, dramatizing the days before Marie Antoinette fled Versailles, would have some
new insight into the ways of the decadent royals. But Benoît Jacquot's
film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism: The queen (Diane Kruger), a
naive chatterbox, is seen through the eyes of one of her handmaidens,
played by Léa Seydoux as a pouting princess prole with no dimension
beyond her shrewd quietude. Farewell, My Queen was shot in Versailles, but its flat schematism only highlights that the backdrops had a better story to tell.
Director: Benoît Jacquot
Writer: Benoît Jacquot & Gilles Taurand (screenplay); Chantal Thomas (novel)
Starring: Diane Kruger, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen
Release Date: July13, 2012
As much as it is a study in Stockholm syndrome, however, Farewell, My Queen
is equally a study in lighting. The rapid change between soft sunlit
chambers, candlelit corridors and nighttime darkness carries the mood of
the movie from beginning to end. When we first see Kruger, the white
sunlight bathing a room of pale fabrics and skin make her seem wonderful
and pure. Later, when the list of 286 heads to be chopped off begins to
circulate, the orange shadows in the stone hallways of the servants’
quarters are suitably apocalyptic. And when Kruger gets a hold of it,
the firelight that is unable to successfully light her overly large room
conveys both impossible warmth and inevitable squalor. The plot is
literally reflected in the light.
It’s easy to buy into the gilded illusion that possessed the court
during this time of upheaval. In the excess of extraordinary clothes
(fashioned by costume designer Christian Gasc) and visually absorbing
scenery (filmed at Versaille and nearby palaces), the screen overflows
with opulence in nearly every scene, and despite some overdramatic
acting, it’s difficult to look away. But—as history recounts—it would
only be a matter of time before heads would roll, and the spell of
mirrored halls would be replaced with the drabber reality of the masses.
In Farewell, My Queen, though, Jacquot has more fun reliving the former and keeping the latter outside his gates.
