Many big-screen and TV movies have been made about Marie Antoinette, but this film took a very different perspective. It focuses on the final months of the decadent queen's life before she was beheaded. It also dwells on her lesbian affairs instead of her numerous other relationships with men. The entire film was made from the perspective and the eyes of the queen's reader Sidonie Laborde played by Lea Seydoux (Gabrielle in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris). Not sure why the 27-year-old Seydoux is the darling of the French movie world at the moment - her performance in the film is quite flat in my opinion!
Diane Kruger gives a wonderful performance in her portrayal of the tormented and bored queen. At 36, Kruger is more or less the same age when Marie Antoinette was beheaded. The face that launched a thousand ships (Kruger also played Helen of Troy in Troy) is equally magnificent in Farewell My Queen. With her German descent, Kruger is convincing as the young queen from Austria. But the most winning performance comes from Virginie Ledoyen who plays the queen's lesbian love interest Gabrielle de Polignac. With her Spanish blood, Ledoyen is both dangerously beautiful and heartlessly cruel in the movie.
This film ultimately succeeds because it takes a different path in depicting the last days of a decadent empire. Even though we've caught glimpses of the splendour of Versailles every now and then, most of the film takes place in dark corridors and the quarters of the ladies-in-waiting. We get a sense via all the whispers, gossips, scandals and back-stabbing that the French Revolution is lurking close by to clean up the act of the aristocracy. The other key message from the movie is that like all other relationships, lesbian love can often be unrequited and heartbreaking.
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