Les adieux à la reine (2012)

Directed by: Benoît Jacquot | 100 minutes | drama, history | Actors: Diane Kruger, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen, Xavier Beauvois, Noémie Lvovsky, Vladimir Consigny, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Lolita Chammah, Michel Robin, Grégory Gadebois, Francis Leplay, Luc Palun

Director Benoît Jacquot took Chantal Thomas’s historical novel as a source of inspiration to create this solid drama about four days at the French court in Versailles surrounding the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Especially with the knowledge now that the French Revolution in the country brought about enormous change, the film is interesting to watch, and Jacquot cleverly responds to this by showing a lot of surprise among those in power.

Although the story of Marie Antoinette and that of Louis XIV has been filmed before, Jacquot’s version manages to distinguish itself by focusing on a reading lady of the Queen and by following the direction of the novel: four consecutive days, almost entirely in the palace at Versailles, where the nobility feels increasingly uneasy, passing through various stages of ignorance, misunderstanding and panic as the population becomes invisible but perceptibly more menacing to them.

The cast consists largely of women full of longing looks. Léa Seydoux, Diane Kruger and Virginie Ledoyen stare at each other in love throughout the film, which enhances the intensity of the whole. Moreover, most of director Jacquot’s choices have a positive effect. The lighting is subtle, but beautiful, and although the cameras wobble too much at times, there are beautiful scenes in which characters are followed through dark corridors and in flashes of candlelight, showing faces of impotence that no one at the French Court could really believe that their years of power were over.

Many filmmaker Jacquot continues his long list of successful book adaptations. Having previously visited Cannes and Venice, ‘Les adieux à la reine’ was rightly selected for Berlin. At no point does the film pretend to be more than what it is: small cinema on a large set; an intimate and at times intense portrait of people who are losing their power.