Maïwenn’s films, like Maïwenn herself, tend to be divisive.
When they’re good, such as in the writer-director-actress’s second film, Policies, they are filled with hot ensemble performances that channel the kinetic energy of John Cassavetes. When they are not, as in her last attempt, DNAthey feel like exaggerated arthouse selfies where Maïwenn is the sole star.
Jeanne du Barry
The bottom row
Beautiful and boring.
Either way, they hardly leave you indifferent, which is why the director’s biggest project to date, a $22.4 million biopic about the legendary 18th century, the French courtesan Jeanne du Barry, may seem so surprising. Lavishly made and with enough striking costumes – several of them courtesy of Chanel, one of the film’s sponsors – to warrant a separate runway show, Maïwenn’s opulent feature is also, well, kind of boring.
It has a great setting, with many scenes shot in and around the real Palace of Versailles, and a great setting, with Du Barry’s rags-to-riches to King Louis XV biography as the main plot. But once that’s all in place, Maïwenn doesn’t really do much with it.
Even the casting—some might say stunt casting—of Johnny Depp as the king offers a few early thrills and then mostly yawns, with Depp uttering something like a dozen lines in respectable French while otherwise remaining mute. His performance is not bad, nor is Maïwenn’s in the title role. But the two, like the film, rarely get our pulse racing. With all the recent controversy surrounding Depp, not to mention Maywen herself, the result of their collaboration is a beautiful period piece that feels both flat and shallow and certainly far from anything scandal.
There have been several other attempts to bring du Barry’s story to the screen, including Ernst Lubitsch’s silent film Passionstarring Pola Negri and directed by William Dieterle Madame du Barry, starring Dolores del Rio. Most recently, Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette features Asia Argento as the king’s scandalous mistress, a role Maywen claims inspired her to one day direct her own project about the courtesan.
Working with writers Teddy Luci-Modeste and Nicolas Livecki, she practically put together a classic Cinderella story dressed in outrageously expensive outfits—one that focused almost exclusively on Du Barry’s desire to get rich and stay rich, and rarely on the social and political issues of the Versailles bubble where she flourished.
In fact, the most intriguing part of the film happens before we even get to the palace, as we follow a young commoner named Jeanne Bequeu, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress mother, as she moves from aristocratic benefactor to benefactor and then from lover to lover, in this, which remains one of the most impressive social climbs in history.
Maïwenn directs these early sequences with a detached and cool authority, recalling how Kubrick did Barry Lyndon — clearly another major inspiration, right down to this film’s dry voice-over narrating all the major events — and she paints a brief but convincing portrait of a young woman left with only two choices: the Bible or the bedroom.
To speed her rise to the top, Bequeu was smart enough to choose the latter, and she soon falls into the arms of Comte du Barry (Melville Poupaud), a witty playboy who begins pimping her out to other nobles. Jeanne’s beauty and sexiness make her a legendary mistress around Paris, but it’s actually her intelligence that charms all those rich and royal men who fall for her like a fresh piece of meat.
Perhaps the most affecting scene in the entire film is the one that takes place in the first act, when Jeanne, a voracious reader and highly capable teacher, tries to find peace and quiet with a book in the bathtub – until the Count comes in and dunks her under the water of toxic malice. This is the only moment in the film where Jeanne’s predicament as an inferior woman in a world of petty, privileged men is felt viscerally.
Intense outbursts of verbal and sometimes physical violence have been a key part of Maven’s cinema, but once Jeanne reaches Versailles, where the count takes her in the hope of raising his own status vis-a-vis Louis XV, it’s all about tame rituals that sometimes are violated. The director goes to great lengths to point out some of the more absurd traditions of the French court, like never turning your back on the king – a gag that’s repeated so often it quickly becomes tiresome – but that’s about as deep as it gets.
After Jeanne catches Louis’ eye and the king is duly smitten, the rest of the film chronicles their long (six-year, actually) supposedly romantic love affair, which is never quite as intriguing as it could be. For one thing, the two hardly speak to each other, so engrossed are they in the endless tasks of the palace, which are managed by the king’s trusted first valet, La Borde (Benjamin Lavergne, a steely, constant presence).
A quick look at Wikipedia shows that La Borde was actually a musician and composer of comic operas, but you wouldn’t know any of that from a film that tends to cling to the surface of its characters. The same goes for du Barry, who, one learns, has meddled quite a bit in domestic and international affairs during her reign as top mistress, but whose main achievement here is starting a fashion trend of striped dresses.
To add more drama to the third act, Maïwenn focuses on the rivalry between Jeanne du Barry and Marie-Antoinette (Pauline Pohlmann)—a rivalry sparked and complicated by Louis XV’s daughters (Hair of India, Suzanne de Becke, Capuchin Valmarie), depicted here as the insidious evil spawn of a Disney film. As this plot unfolds, the film is drained of its remaining substance, and as the king lies on his deathbed, riddled with smallpox, Jeanne du Barry it feels like a cartoon.
It’s unfortunate that this happens, considering the combination of the subject and Maïwenn’s talent as a director, which this time is demonstrated through a high level of craftsmanship – whether it’s Jürgen Döring’s costumes, Laurent Dyland’s exquisite photography or the sets of Angelo Zamparutti capturing the extraordinary richness of the time. Tying the package is seductive music by Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare in Love), which more often fills in the emotions that fail to be generated on screen.
The film’s scope is so ambitious that it may have become too overwhelming for a director who usually hits his best notes through improvisation with a tight-knit cast, creating memorable scenes that suddenly become explosive. There is none of that here and the paradox of Jeanne du Barry is that, despite the daring life it’s based on and the daring cast of the half-black Depp, it’s a film that ultimately plays it too safe.