« « Madame du Barry » : paparazzi dreams come true. (4/5) | HomePage | Fmff : summer break, now. »
Jul 02, 2008
« Madame du Barry » : the harder the fall. (5/5)
Though less irrevocably linked to each other than their characters’ destinies, both « Madame du Barry » and « Marie-Antoinette » are visually splendid period pieces, which brilliantly recreate life in Versailles and solve the challenges of their overlapping chronologies in similar fashion.
Both are happy films with tragic endings, which speed through or ignore the increasingly unhappy times met by their heroines, and, despite their tiles, no biographies.
Most of « Madame du Barry » takes place between 1765, when Jeanne Bécu enters Louis XV’s bedroom, and 1774, when Louis XIV dies and she is exiled from Versailles, first to a convent, then to the Louveciennes castle her royal lover had offered to her : less than a decade in a life which filled exactly five.
Most of « Marie-Antoinette » happens between the Austrian teenager’s arrival in Versailles for her wedding, in 1770, and the birth of her first son, in 1781.
Both characters later followed the same path from the king of France’s bed to the scaffold. Both were equally reviled and libelled, one as « la putain du roi » -the king’s whore-, the other as « l’Autrichienne », accused of debauchery or adultery and of bleeding the kingdom to its ruin by their extravagant expenses.
Adversity would eventually bring them together, off screen and if historians are to be trusted : after Madame du Barry helped Marie-Antoinette in a real estate transaction, some form of affection supposedly developed between them.
Nearly as soon as Louis XV dies, « Madame du Barry » takes us back to the fair in revolutionary Paris : there, the film started its story ; there, we return to hear, but not see, how it ends.
Louis XVI was beheaded in January of 1793, Marie-Antoinette in October. We are now in December, though the studio setting seems to bask in a never-ending spring. Madame du Barry is led through the fair to her date with the executioner, but we shall not see her : the camera shies away from tabloid reporting and chooses to stay with a woman and a young kid.
When we last saw her, entering disgrace, Madame du Barry was young, beautiful and defiant. This is how the film wants us to remember her, as if the happy days she lived more than made up for the last tragic one.
According to History books, Marie-Antoinette faced death with the dignity that became a queen and Madame du Barry was taken to the guillotine screaming.
According to the same History books, Madame du Barry’s heart never let out her famous desperate last line : « Encore une minute, M. Le Bourreau », « One more minute, executioner », but what can History books do against a legend ?
Not much more than Christian-Jaque’s film, which does not repeat its title character’s apocryphal call for a time-out, probably less in deference to historical accuracy than to Henri Jeanson, never one to grant the last word, particularly a memorable one, to a competitor.
08:05 Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this