>
Film
Four days before the French Revolution arrived at the gates of Versailles, it was business as usual. The queen was preoccupied with fashion and the romantic intrigues of her aristocratic attendants, the maids gossiped about their masters’ dalliances and their own, and the main annoyances were the swamp-bred mosquitoes and water rats overrunning the palace.
This is the perspective on court life of Marie Antoinette’s devoted servant, Sidonie Laborde. As we follow her through the monarchy’s abrupt collapse, Farewell, My Queen gives us intimate, unflaggingly energetic history as seen from the servants’ quarters.
The relationship between Sidonie (Léa Seydoux, Midnight in Paris) and her queen (Diane Kruger, Inglourious Basterds) is a composite of duty, warm affection, pettiness and ambiguous sensuality. Her Majesty, still girlish though no longer youthful, sensuously rubs ointment on the mosquito-bitten forearm of her lovely lady in waiting, proclaiming it “perfectly pudgy.”
It is Sidonie’s duty to read poems, plays and essays aloud while Marie leafs through fabric swatches and fashion illustrations. With Sidonie at her side, the queen enjoys a semblance of human contact without the obligation to contribute. Marie favors her with smiles, hugs and compliments. Sidonie humbly devotes herself to the queen’s amusement even as word of revolt on the streets of nearby Paris begins to flit around the servants’ quarters.
Director Benoit Jacquot stages several spectacular scenes involving crowds filling the palace’s access corridors, groping along by candlelight as they share baffling half-truths and wild rumors about the upheaval that is soon to engulf them.
The plot is discursive, with detours into the love lives of castle guards and gondoliers, a dance scene and heaps of political skullduggery. As danger draws nearer to Versailles, Marie makes Sidonie a dress-up decoy intended to save Marie’s beloved Duchess Gabrielle de Polignac (ravishing Virginie Ledoyen).
The wellborn beauties share an intense emotional bond that stops just short of the lesbianism that anti-royalist pamphleteers of the time attributed to them. We feel the pang of the queen’s transformation into an unfeeling pragmatist as sharply as poor Sidonie. Paraphrasing Mel Brooks, it’s not always good to be the queen, and downright heartbreaking to be her devoted handmaiden.
Recent Articles
Director JJ Abrams has followed up his sensational 2009 Star Trek reboot with a sparkling 3D sequel.
The core of the earlier film is present and correct: Chris Pine as… more »
Some audiences have trouble with experimental films. I have trouble with experimental films that aren’t experimental enough.
Truthfully, I prefer straight-up, linear narratives. Character, conflict, catharsis—you know, all those things… more »
The center holds amidst all the razzle-dazzle and razzmatazz of Baz Luhrmann’s endlessly extravagant screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imperishable The Great Gatsby. As is inevitable with the Australian… more »
After nearly crashing and burning on his last solo flight in 2010, Iron Man returns refreshed and ready for action in this spirited third installment of the thus-far $1.2 billion-grossing… more »
A potent comedy of genetic chaos, Starbuck is pointedly contemporary and occasionally cloying, but guaranteed to draw attention for its premise and central character—a sperm donor who has ended up… more »
Suggesting all that is lost when people rush to replace the old ways with shiny new alternatives, Studio Ghibli’s gorgeously hand-drawn period romance From Up on Poppy Hill tells the… more »
