If Sophia Coppola’s stylized, candy-coated Marie Antoinette wasn’t your cup of tea, then perhaps you will find Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen to be a more palatable look at the last days of the life of France’s famously callous and doomed queen. This film still paints Antoinette (a slightly overacting Diane Kruger) as having the privileged whims and shallow concerns of the character from Coppola’s film, but her life in the palace at Versailles here is presented less as an excuse to indulge in design fetish, and more as a chance to give a grounded, realist account of what life must have been like in the era—complete with a mood of doom and paranoia.
The lead character here isn’t the Queen herself, but one of her servants, who she uses as a personal reader/librarian (Léa Seydoux). Seydoux is a French actress who’s recently broke in the English speaking world due to roles in Midnight in Paris and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and it was her presence that drew me to watching this one. The good news is that she’s just as stunning a figure as ever, and she gives a strong performance that anchors the film well. Her ability to project relatable vulnerability is quite effective at putting you in her character’s shoes and allowing you to empathize with her emotions. We see the whole revolution through this servant’s eyes, and as she’s not a member of the ruling class, her plight conveys to us just how confusing and powerless it must have been to be a common person dealing with times of social upheaval before the information age.
The bad news is that, due to this perspective, Farewell, My Queen can get a little bit boring. It raises questions of identity and explores the division between the haves and the have-nots, and those themes do manage to build to a tense and effective finale, but you can’t help but think that there might have been a more interesting path to take to get to that endpoint. Too often we’re asked to become invested in slight slip-ups in the mannered etiquette of the time, or gossip surrounding whose relationships might be a little bit inappropriate—and meanwhile there’s an historic social revolution going on beyond the palace walls that we never get a glimpse of. It’s hard to not wish this was a movie where Seydoux played a peasant girl caught up in the storming of the Bastille, and not one in which she’s worried over the tapestries of a flighty queen.
