Les Adieux à la reine (2012)
Directed by Benoît Jacquot

Film Review

So often and so consistently has the royal court of Versailles been depicted in cinema that it is hard to imagine that it was anything other than a gilded haven of refinement and luxury, a world apart from the squalor and penury that was the lot of most French people of the time.  In his latest film, director Benoît Jacquot breaks with convention and offers an earthier, far more sordid conception of Versailles.  On the eve of the French Revolution, it is a dead mausoleum plagued with rats, mosquitoes and other vermin.  The perfumed salons and gilded corridors are infested with the lingering stench of sordid political and amorous intrigue.  A parody of its former grandeur, Versailles has succumbed to decay and decadence and is now a crumbling edifice, a symbol of a monarchy that has outlived its purpose and is about to be swept away by a tsunami of change.

As powerfully as the film evokes the era in which it is set, its dramatic core is not historical fact but an historical fiction, taken from a novel of the same title by Chantal Thomas.  Les Adieux à la reine is about the fraught relationship between three women - Queen Marie Antoinette, her lesbian lover Gabrielle de Polignac and the queen's devoted personal reader Sidonie Laborde - and takes place over the four days preceding the fall of the monarchy.  Women reacting to crises is one of the central themes of Jacquot's oeuvre and this latest film feels like a synthesis of much of his earlier work, viscerally intense and harrowingly true to life, such is the quality of Gilles Taurand's screenwriting and the vibrant performances from a truly remarkable cast.  That Jacquot was able to shoot much of the film in the interior of the Château de Versailles (a privilege rarely afforded to filmmakers) can only add to its startling realism.

Of the many actresses to have played Marie Antoinette in cinema over the past century, Diane Kruger is arguably the one on whom the role sits easiest.  Certainly her regal beauty, noble bearing and slight Germanic accent lend credibility to her portrayal, but it is Kruger's skill at revealing the queen's inner soul, in particular the extent of her amour fou for her female lover and the conflict this causes with her devotion to her husband, King Louis XVI, that makes her interpretation of the character so compelling and so authentic.  Virginie Ledoyen, the star of Jacquot's earlier La Fille seule (1995), is just as mesmerising as the queen's sumptuous paramour, another complex character who is all too aware of the precarity of her situation.

As impressive as Kruger and Ledoyen are, both are very nearly eclipsed by the charismatic charmer Léa Seydoux, who takes centre stage as the ardent companion, Sidonie Laborde.  In contrast to Kruger and Ledoyen, who really do look as if they belong to the era in which the film is set, Seydoux has an unadorned modernity that makes her appear strangely out of place.  This actually works to the film's advantage.  It is through her that we enter Versailles in its eventful last few days and experience the confusion and horror that takes hold of the protagonists as they wake up to the terrible reality of their predicament.  In passing, it is worth paying tribute to the supporting cast, especially Noémie Lvovsky, Julie-Marie Parmentier and Xavier Beauvois, a surprisingly effective choice for the part of King Louis.

Les Adieux à la reine provides a long-overdue antidote to the recent spate of historical dramas that rely too heavily on cinematic clichés and portrayals of historical figures that have altered little since the dawn of cinema.  It is this bland, lazy representation of history, exemplified by Sofia Coppola's lacklustre Marie Antoinette (2006), that Jacquot rejects in his film in an attempt to make his characters and their life story relevant to a modern audience.  Jacquot and his screenwriter are sympathetic to historical fact but they resolutely avoid shackling themselves to the populist notions that cinema has engendered.  Les Adieux à la reine is a courageous (albeit slightly self-conscious) attempt to pump new lifeblood into the dusty veins of historical storytelling, and the result is a period drama of rare immediacy and narrative power, the most sensual and brutally poignant of all Jacquot's films.

Film Synopsis

In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, life at the Palace of Versailles continues in its carefree vein, far from the tumult that is starting to overtake Paris.  When the royal court receives news of the taking of the Bastille, noblemen and servants take fright and the château soon begins to empty.  Sidonie Laborde, the queen's personal reader, is unperturbed by the rumours of revolution.  She knows that, under the protection of Marie-Antoinette, no harm can befall her...