Review: ‘Jeanne du Barry,’ starring Johnny Depp in his first role after his legal issues, is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous.
If the recent queen’s funeral and king’s coronation weren’t enough royal reverence for you, the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night selection, actor-directorought to satisfy the craving. The film, about King Louis XV’s last official mistress, is lavishly devoted to the grandeur of pre-Revolution Versailles, both its opulent charms and its titillating social drama. The film was an odd choice to open France’s biggest film festival, as anti-austerity protests roil the nation.
Still, the movie is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise,Jeanne du Barry was a commoner who worked as a courtesan, a witty and well-read looker who had the attention of many of France’s male elite before she was introduced to Louis.
Maïwenn certainly made a bold casting choice when she hired herself to play this beautiful, vivacious woman scorned by shrewish ladies of the court and defended by adoring men. Still, Maïwenn sells it. Despite everything one knows about the horrid, greedy excesses of Versailles,invests us in its romance-novel version of things. Jeanne, in Maïwenn’s telling, is kind and noble, a hero worth rooting for.
Which isn’t to say the film is without its galling indulgences. Jeanne was gifted a Black child, a slave, by her loving beau, a gruesome act that the film uses to demonstrate Jeanne’s open-minded compassion. Does she free the boy, called Zamor? No, but she does let him become her servant. How kind. In real life, Zamor made claims of treason against Jeanne during the Revolution, leading to her beheading.
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