We're celebrating Marie Antoinette for a few more days this week. Here's abstew - Editor
The legendary figure of Marie Antoinette has been the subject of gossip and infamy for over 200 years now. Although most scholars agree that all we may think we know about the excessive queen is mostly a misunderstanding. Even the most well-known phrase attributed to her, "Let them eat cake!", has been debunked as never actually been spoken by her. Even in her own time, there were pamphlets spread around France accusing her of infidelities with both men and women. At her trial, she was accused of staging orgies at the Palace of Versailles and even committing incest with her own son. Playing off of these rumors, French director Benoît Jacquot's 2012 film about Marie Antoinette, Farewell, My Queen, based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, invents a lesbian relationship between the Queen and a duchess at court...
But the main character isn't even the queen herself, but her royal reader played by Léa Seydoux. We see the queen, her whims, her worries, and heartbreaks, through the eyes of her servant. Filtered through the young women's view adds another layer of interpretation, so that we still don't really know who this queen is. Unlike Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, who is seen as a heroine and little girl lost, Diane Kruger's Marie in this film is manipulative, cunning, and obsessive - whether it be with her demand for an embroidered dahlia for a new dress or to be reunited with her sapphic sweetheart. She plays on her servant's devotion to her and uses it to her advantage.
Even with the world falling apart around her, Marie's concerns seem frivolous and self-centered. And Kruger plays her with a simmering desperation. A woman that is clinging to her trivial indulgences with everything she can. While planning her escape with her family, she concentrates on seeing her lover, above all. The next item on her agenda, protecting the precious gems in her jewelry. This is the queen of extravagance that we have come to know through myths. Her Finery Book, a fashion bible with fabric samples and designs, becomes a source of much concern when her servant uses it and the return of it to the queen's possession becomes of the utmost importance - never mind that her name is at the top of a list being spread throughout France demanding for the removal of her head.
And it's in her final moments with her reader that her true colors are shown. After a woman is killed in Paris because she resembles the queen's paramour, she instructs her reader to take the duchess with her away to safety, but disguised as the duchess herself. That way if they are attacked on the road, the queen's favored woman will remain safe. After all, the life of a servant can't possibly compare to that of someone so highly regarded by the queen, whose right to rule is ordained by God himself. Mere mortals are but a pawn in her game...
