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Farewell, My Queen offers an intoxicating opportunity to eavesdrop on history, to be a fly on the wall at the great palace at Versailles as an old order starts its slow-motion collapse into the dustbin of history.
As directed by France'sveteran Benoît Jacquot, "Farewell, My Queen" has a potent emotional component as well, involving the tangled emotional lives of three beautiful women: Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger), the queen in question; Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), the monarch's worshipful young servant; and Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), the queen's special favorite.
Matching the strength of these actresses and their personal drama is the film's masterful sense of time and place — the way it makes us feel that this was how it was during four pivotal days in July 1789 as the wheels came off the French monarchy.
Allowed the unusual privilege of actually shooting at Versailles, Jacquot and his director of photography, Romain Winding, bring a sense of intimacy and reality to sequences of uneasy courtiers hurrying down labyrinthine, candlelit corridors. They beautifully convey the chaos and confusion that unfolded as unforeseen, unprecedented events undermined the structure of the monarchy.
The director and Gilles Taurand adapted Chantal Thomas' 2002 novel for the screen, and their Versailles was hardly tranquil even before the tide of history started to turn. The royal court is portrayed as a hotbed of self-interested pettiness and jealous rivalries, not to mention a spot where mosquito bites were fierce and unavoidable and dead rats not hard to find.
Young Sidonie, plucked from obscurity to be a lady-in-waiting to the queen, cares about none of this. Her specific job is as the queen's reader, selecting a book from the royal library and reciting it aloud to her mistress, and she very much cherishes this special closeness to Marie Antoinette.
It is through Sidonie's eyes that we experience what happens in Versailles, and Seydoux is an excellent choice for the role. A remarkably versatile young actress (she was the shopkeeper who caught Luke Wilson's eye in"Midnight in Paris" as well as an assassin in the last "Mission: Impossible"), Seydoux has the kind of presence that involves us in whatever is going on.
The same is true for Kruger in the more multifaceted role of Marie Antoinette. A non-native speaker of French (like her character), the German-born Kruger portrays a quixotic, quicksilver ruler, a creature of ever-changing whims who wants to be obeyed absolutely even as she sometimes tries to forget she's the queen.
This movie is great and absolutely well-described. I really loved it because we never saw this period before. It is really interesting to see Marie-Antoinette this way. And the actresses are really great. I discovered Lea Seydoux and already knew Diane Kruger who is beautiful. This movie has absolutely changed the image I had of French movies. I really thought it interesting, touching and not fixed in the past - we can all identify ourselves in many situations of the movie, and understand how much the present is fragile. Even if Farewell My Queen is a historic movie, human feelings, actions and preoccupations are pretty much the same as today. I really has a few knowledge about this period and thanks to this movie and would like to know more and more about the French Revolution - this movie is a kind of French Revolution for me.
Farewell, My Queen offers an intoxicating opportunity to eavesdrop on history, to be a fly on the wall at the great palace at Versailles as an old order starts its slow-motion collapse into the dustbin of history.
As directed by France'sveteran Benoît Jacquot, "Farewell, My Queen" has a potent emotional component as well, involving the tangled emotional lives of three beautiful women: Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger), the queen in question; Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), the monarch's worshipful young servant; and Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), the queen's special favorite.
Matching the strength of these actresses and their personal drama is the film's masterful sense of time and place — the way it makes us feel that this was how it was during four pivotal days in July 1789 as the wheels came off the French monarchy.
Allowed the unusual privilege of actually shooting at Versailles, Jacquot and his director of photography, Romain Winding, bring a sense of intimacy and reality to sequences of uneasy courtiers hurrying down labyrinthine, candlelit corridors. They beautifully convey the chaos and confusion that unfolded as unforeseen, unprecedented events undermined the structure of the monarchy.
The director and Gilles Taurand adapted Chantal Thomas' 2002 novel for the screen, and their Versailles was hardly tranquil even before the tide of history started to turn. The royal court is portrayed as a hotbed of self-interested pettiness and jealous rivalries, not to mention a spot where mosquito bites were fierce and unavoidable and dead rats not hard to find.
Young Sidonie, plucked from obscurity to be a lady-in-waiting to the queen, cares about none of this. Her specific job is as the queen's reader, selecting a book from the royal library and reciting it aloud to her mistress, and she very much cherishes this special closeness to Marie Antoinette.
It is through Sidonie's eyes that we experience what happens in Versailles, and Seydoux is an excellent choice for the role. A remarkably versatile young actress (she was the shopkeeper who caught Luke Wilson's eye in"Midnight in Paris" as well as an assassin in the last "Mission: Impossible"), Seydoux has the kind of presence that involves us in whatever is going on.
The same is true for Kruger in the more multifaceted role of Marie Antoinette. A non-native speaker of French (like her character), the German-born Kruger portrays a quixotic, quicksilver ruler, a creature of ever-changing whims who wants to be obeyed absolutely even as she sometimes tries to forget she's the queen.
This movie is great and absolutely well-described. I really loved it because we never saw this period before. It is really interesting to see Marie-Antoinette this way. And the actresses are really great. I discovered Lea Seydoux and already knew Diane Kruger who is beautiful. This movie has absolutely changed the image I had of French movies. I really thought it interesting, touching and not fixed in the past - we can all identify ourselves in many situations of the movie, and understand how much the present is fragile. Even if Farewell My Queen is a historic movie, human feelings, actions and preoccupations are pretty much the same as today. I really has a few knowledge about this period and thanks to this movie and would like to know more and more about the French Revolution - this movie is a kind of French Revolution for me.