At Versailles, on the eve of the French Revolution, a mosquito squadron chooses who will lay feast to their blood lust. And the winner is……………. Sidonie.
Meanwhile, in Paris a swarm of another kind is bloodletting. When news of the assault on the Bastille reaches the court at Versailles’ ears, the nobles flee along with their servants, deserting the palace.
Sidonie Laborde, a young reader of the Court who is devoted to the Queen, refuses to believe the rumours. She is certain that under Marie- Antoinette’s protection she will come to no harm.
FAREWELL, MY QUEEN (M) tells of the fall of the French monarchy, in the period between the 14th July, the day of the storming of the Bastille, and the 16th, when Louis XVI, under public pressure, was forced to sack Breteuil, the nepotistic PM he had installed a mere hundred hours before.. The entire story is told through the eyes of a young Sidonie , whose vocation at Versailles is to read fashion mags, poems and prose to her glamorous liege.
In the four-day period that the story covers, we witness the total collapse of the nobility living at Versailles: protocol, conventions, everything collapses and everyone is looking to escape. This story is a bit like the Titanic, says director Benoit Jacquot, where a ship that is considered the most beautiful construction in the world starts taking on water and then sinks, setting off a tsunami of panic.
Léa SEYDOUX is lovely as “la lectrice”, Sidonie Laborde, and Diane KRUGER is a revelation as Marie-Antoinette, her beauty and bearing bringing a magical magisterial quality. Virginie LEDOYEN plays Marie-Antoinette’s latest “lady in waiting”, Gabrielle de Polignac, a smouldering latent eroticism at play between the pair.
Based on the novel by Chantal Thomas, this consummate costume drama is directed by Benoît JACQUOT deftly compressing the few days of the narrative into a sublime upstairs/downstairs observation of a turbulent time – a time the ironically named Swiss Banker and Finance Minister Jaques Necker sought to reduce public expenditures by such measures as abolishing unnecessary positions – abolishing the crowned heads literally – by not only severing their sovereignty but their noggins from their bodies.
Finally, the great star of the film is Versailles itself, lavish, lush, a vanity that helped build the bonfire that burned the Bourbons. Its history haunts every frame and imbues the picture with a verisimilitude that traverses the past and makes the events depicted very present.