Upstairs / Downstairs at the Court of Versailles

Film review: Les Adieux à la Reine Directed by Benoît Jacquot, written by Gilles Taurand, Benoît Jacquot, GMT Productions

Touring the palace at Versailles today, it’s impossible not to wonder What It Was Like: the well-preserved main buildings and grounds do nothing so much as to evoke refined courtiers and glamorous ladies-in-waiting swanning around the gardens or lolling about the Hall of Mirrors waiting for an appearance from Louis XVI or, on the rare occasion she emerged from her aerie, his queen, Marie-Atoinette.

What visitors are not allowed to see are the servants’ quarters: the grimy back halls of Versailles where an entire shadow population of servants lived out their lives.  Director Benoît Jacquot’s new film Les Adieux à la Reine finally lets us see what life was really like at at the grand palais.  

Set on the eve of the French Revolution, Les Adieux à la Reine takes place behind the scenes, away from the gilded opulence of the royal salons and into the dark garrets and corridors that house everyone from footmen to stable boys to gondoliers (!), and the young courtiers and ladies-in-waiting just at the beginning of their careers – careers that are about to be cruelly cut short when the Bastille is stormed the very next day.

But on this day, life at Versailles carries on as normal, engaged in complex rituals of subservience, backstabbing and vicious competition among the entire hierarchy of court attendants vying for protection, patronage, strategic marriages and, ultimately, favour from the King or Queen.  Seemingly unaware of the unrest in the capital, the Court at Versaille is just as grandiose and frivolous and oblivious as every cliché makes it out to be.

Through the Looking Glass

Young Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux), an educated young woman called upon to read for the Queen, is just as wrapped up in clawing her way to the top as everyone else. When we meet her, she is groggily preparing to wait upon the Queen, trading barbs with rivals, begging perfume from an ally, forced to run all the way to the Petit Trianon and yet appear calm and collected upon her arrival.  She is on the lowest rung of the ladder, a fact driven home when the Queen’s favorite, the duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) sweeps out of the Queen’s chambers and past Sidonie as though the poor girl doesn’t even exist.

But no matter: Sidonie is both ambitious and besotted with the queen herself.  As is necessary for all young ladies of good standing at court, she is determined and pragmatic about finding a protector and, ultimately, a husband – despite being charmed by a handsome young gondolier, a drageur both literal and figurative.  She is a girl who gets ahead of herself, as illustrated by her habit of marching through Versailles at such speed she literally pitches forward and falls – more than once.  She’s clearly a girl with a future… if her world were not about to come crashing down.

Presenting herself before the Queen, a simple act of kindness on Marie-Antoinette’s part – calling for and herself applying a salve to ease the mosquito bites that tattoo Sidonie’s arms – seduces the girl so completely that desire mingles with devotion to produce a heady and permanent mix of blind loyalty to her queen.

It is this devotion, bordering on idolatry, which keeps Sidonie at Versailles and in service to Marie-Antoinette despite the mass exodus of servants, courtiers, noblemen and women, guards and anyone else who wishes to keep their head.  Not that Sidonie’s devotion is entirely innocent – she attempts to gather and trade information to be used for her own protection and ambitions, both virtuous and selfish.  Her determination and deft trade in secrets points to what would have been a successful and possibly illustrious career at Versailles, a painful irony since court life is about to come a permanent and violent end.

Let Them Eat Torte

Played by Diane Kruger, this Marie-Antoinette is mostly a mélange of popular historical clichés rather than fact.  She is, at the film’s opening, the frivolous, impetuous Marie-Antoinette that everyone loves to hate, seducing her ladies-in-waiting, barely bothering to get out of her sumptuous bed, spending her days being read to by the likes of Sidonie or designing new gowns for herself and her particuliers, her favored inner-circle of friends that included the beautiful Duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) with whom, it was rumoured, Marie-Antoinette was engaged in a lesbian affair.  Writer-director Benoit Jacquot bases his characters upon these rumours and titillates with suggested lesbian encounters and desire that has relatively little to do with the plot, suggesting that Marie-Antoinette was more concerned over her relationship with her lesbian lover than the death sentence she was increasingly certain was inevitable.  To Kruger’s credit, she captures Marie-Antoinette’s growing panic and ensuing resolve beautifully, even if she seems to get serious about the situation a little too late, vowing to stay by her husband’s side while entreating the Duchesse de Polignac to save herself and flee France.

Art vs. Reality

In reality, Marie-Antoinette was, during this time, mourning her eldest child, the Dauphin, dead only a month before of tuberculosis.  She had already turned her back on the duchesse de Polignac, whose continued extravagances and frivolities at court in defiance of the budget reforms adopted by the King wasn’t doing Marie-Antoinette’s reputation any favours.  For her part, the duchesse de Polignac abandoned ship in May 1789, leaving not only France behind, but her children as well, abandoning Queen, country and kin two months before the storming of the Bastille and the removal of the royal family from Versailles.  

But Les Adieux à la Reine is not so much about historical fact as it is about the people lost to history. The panic behind the scenes in the back stairs and rooms of Versailles – crowding into candlelit corridors stricken rats on a sinking ship when the first list of condemned is circulated – contrasts beautifully with the strange, dream-like tension playing out in the royal halls.  While Sidonie moves between the two, increasingly desperate to steer events far beyond her control, the two worlds eventually merge to create a night-terror of fear, confusion and despair.  Historical figures are often writ large against the backdrop of the events that cement their place in time; we never learn what happens to the little people, the common men and women with no control over the events of their time but who often suffer most.

May 2012, France Magazine

Cry the Beloved Country: 24 Mexican Artists on Mexico

Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000 / 2012 at Musée d’Art Moderne April 2012

The curators of Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne claim in the exhibition literature that in today’s world of globalized economies – artistic, technological, financial – featuring the art of a single nation seems almost dépassé while at the same time throwing into sharp relief questions of identify and specificity.

Regardless of European unions, NAFTA, and the borderless regions of cyberspace, if ever the relevance and purpose of art is called into question, witness the work produced by artists whose country is in great flux.  The best 20th century example of this is the German Expressionists, who started out merely playing with color, line and form and ended up creating a visual language that aptly gave voice to the jagged, broken horror of Germany – and Europe – under the Third Reich.

Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 creates a visual zócalo of Mexico’s most prominent contemporary artists as they comment on their country’s current state of flux.  The commentary is not bright – there is no evidence of margaritas or Mariachis, no Virgin of Guadalupe, no quirky Dio de lo Muertos, sombreros or cumbia. Instead, the 24 artists featured are quite clearly (and understandably) angry, bitter, dark and bordering on apocalyptic.  

Over the past 15 years, Mexico has been (not so quietly) been going through a revolution.  In 2000, after 71 years of the ruling PRI’s stronghold on the country, Vicente Fox won the presidency.  Ushering in a new era of democracy and transparency, the Fox administration’s main accomplishment was to lay the groundwork for the current president, Felipe Calderón.  In office since 2006, Calderón has introduced sweeping social, economic and political changes across the country – mostly innovative and good – while his infamous war on drugs has resulted in escalating violence between the military, law enforcement and the drug cartels, and more and more innocent Mexicans getting caught in the crossfire.  Meanwhile, the country is painfully wrangling itself onto the world economic stage; painful because it’s the world’s 5th largest economy, but is perpetually constrained by the complicated social and economic relationships with the United States that often seem designed to give Mexico the short end of the stick.

Art in Mexico has a way of relating to the elements that North American art does not.  It is both indoors and out, invites the dust and the heat and the foliage and the blue sky in while at the same time straining to be released back out into the wild, into that very same blue sky.

Walking into the exhibit it is this longing for flight that first impacts the viewer. Arturo Hernández Alcázar’s Black Kites (Bird of Ill Omen) / Papalotes Negros (Ave de Mal Agüero) is a flock of lamp-blackened children’s kites are tethered to the ground by bricks and stones while they strain against the museum’s ceiling for release.  The effect is both breathtaking and heartbreaking: the beauty of those kites aloft both tethered to the ground and trapped by the ceiling a poignant metaphor for Mexico’s future which, as long as it is chained to its past, can never truly soar.

Bayrol Jiménez’ Maldito, a wall mural in line-drawing that is both graphic art and baroque masterpiece, explodes across the gallery.  Beginning with a cherub whose guts literally spill all of Mexican history onto the canvas, the wall, the floor and all the way across the room, Jiménez’ pen saunters past the majestic Aztec and Mayan ruins, meanders through the cult of San Muerte, wanders across the drug wars and immigration, and ends in  Catholicism, presided over by a perverted Mexican coat of arms, the snake strangling the cherub and the Mexican eagle bearing a death’s head and American stars on its breast. It’s an incredibly busy piece that at first overwhelms, like a Mexican oilcloth shopping bag brightly covered in images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, cherubs, stars, rays of divinity, and who knows what else – a jumble of kitsch at first glance, but significant and often charming once the eye gets used to it.  Of course, there is nothing charming about Jimenez’ Maldito, although it’s all as significant as the words painted across the floor that bridge the two separate parts of the work: Una piedra en el camino me enseño que mi destino es a robar y robar y robar y robar… (a bump in the road showed me that my destiny is to steal and rob and steal and steal… ).

The rest of the works in the first rooms are more conceptual, although equally moving.  A giant structure of windsocks called Credibility Crisis is on the one hand blatantly obvious in its statement about hot air blowing in every direction, but then its overstatement becomes again symbolic.  Niños Perdidos is a series of tiny photocopied reproductions of the missing children flyers plastered all over Mexico’s major cities, the images themselves often blurry and vague as though the longer the child is missing, its image disappears too.  A wall of bricks without mortar is meant to represent Kafka’s The Castle, but works also as a comment on the walls and fences America keeps threatening to build along the Mexican border as futile attempt at stemming illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, the curators saved all the best works for the beginning of the exhibition.  It’s a great way to seduce you into the following rooms, looking for and expecting to be as powerfully impacted by the first few paces.  This isn’t the case.  While there are notable installations, they are either so abstract or performative as to effectively lose their punch.  The most sensational piece in one of the subsequent rooms is a room – sit in a dark room and watch a videotaped interview of a killer for the drug lords, a highly disturbing (or satisfying, depending on your kind of kink) experience that recreates the videographer’s experience of being locked in a hotel room with a man who has, unconscientiously, killed literally hundreds of people.  Other film and video installations include Carlos Reygadas, Nicolás Pereda, and Natalia Almada’s El Velador, a far more subtle and strange documentary of one of the most incredible cemeteries you’ll ever see.

The final piece is video installation of a women’s football game played at high altitude. The curators called the combination of female teams in a traditionally male dominated society playing a match against the backdrop of the ancient ruins “surreal” (although: have they not seen Mexico’s National Women’s Football Team?  They came in second in the 2010 Women’s CONCACAF). Without the liner notes, I’m not sure I would have come to the same conclusion as the curators, but sitting and watching for a while – that blue sky, the hot dust, and two teams straining against their environment to win a game – it does strike one as surreal, especially when you consider that the real struggle in that breathtaking geography is against each other.

Vingt Paris Magazine, May 2012