Flashback: Farewell, My Queen – Benoît Jacquot portrays desire at Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution
Marie Antoinette is a sexually manipulative lesbian in this fictitious flirt with historical fact
Like the British, the French regularly turn out period films of varying quality. Farewell, My Queen (2012) stands out because director Benoît Jacquot spends as much time developing the dramatic intrigue as he does depicting the sumptuous costumes and carefully recreated sets.
Based on a 2002 book of the same name by historian and novelist Chantal Thomas, the film is a fictional account of a few days in the life of Marie Antionette, the queen whose profligate lifestyle helped bring about the French Revolution. The film’s big idea is to show the effect of the revolution on the lives of the monarchy through the eyes of a young servant girl, Sidonie.
Events are presented from her subjective viewpoint, and the viewer, like the girl, must piece together what is happening in the wider world from the scraps of information she is able to discover from friends in the palace, and her contact with the queen. Jacquot is rigorous in his approach, and gives the viewer no information that Sidonie could not have acquired.
Farewell, My Queen features real-life characters and events, but is a self-confessed fiction. History unfurls roughly on the correct timeline, but the filmmakers take liberties with the lives of the people involved.
It’s 1789, at the start of the French Revolution, when the French people deposed a financially ruinous monarchy to establish a republic. Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) works at the Palace of Versailles, where she’s employed to read stories to Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger).