If the recent queen’s funeral and king’s coronation weren’t enough royal reverence for you, the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night selection, actor-director Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry, ought to satisfy the craving. The film, about King Louis XV’s last official mistress, is lavishly devoted to the grandeur of pre-Revolution Versailles, both its opulent charms and its titillating social drama. The film was an odd choice to open France’s biggest film festival, as anti-austerity protests roil the nation. Is such slavish 1 percent worship really what the people want?
Still, the movie is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise, Jeanne du Barry wants you to feel the fantasy.
Jeanne du Barry was a commoner who worked as a courtesan, a witty and well-read looker who had the attention of many of France’s male elite before she was introduced to Louis. Maïwenn renders Jeanne as playful and seductive, a passionate woman whose only crime was trying to rise above her station. And, of course, falling in love with the king. We’ve had less serious versions of this story in plenty of films before, from Pretty Woman to The Prince & Me, and Maïwenn shrewdly delivers many of the genre’s treasured trappings: fashion reveals, kindly servants who flash Jeanne warmly conspiratorial smiles (think Hector Elizondo), and of course a cadre of bitter haters determined to put Jeanne back in her place.
Maïwenn certainly made a bold casting choice when she hired herself to play this beautiful, vivacious woman scorned by shrewish ladies of the court and defended by adoring men. Still, Maïwenn sells it. Despite everything one knows about the horrid, greedy excesses of Versailles, Jeanne du Barry invests us in its romance-novel version of things. Jeanne, in Maïwenn’s telling, is kind and noble, a hero worth rooting for.
Which isn’t to say the film is without its galling indulgences. Jeanne was gifted a Black child, a slave, by her loving beau, a gruesome act that the film uses to demonstrate Jeanne’s open-minded compassion. Does she free the boy, called Zamor? No, but she does let him become her servant. How kind. In real life, Zamor made claims of treason against Jeanne during the Revolution, leading to her beheading. But the film is coy about that, simply noting that Zamor renounced his master when everyone had to “choose sides.” Maïwenn’s strenuous disinterest in the politics of her story is never more glaring than in that instance, a haughty dismissal of such a pesky thing as context.
There is also the matter of Maïwenn’s personal controversies, which include public anti–#MeToo statements and an incident in which she spit on a journalist, who claims that it was retaliation for reporting on the sexual assault accusations against Maïwenn’s ex-husband, director Luc Besson. (Besson has denied all allegations, and a Paris judge dismissed a rape case against him following an investigation.) It’s difficult to separate all that from Jeanne du Barry’s routine suspicion of women and favoring of men, the way the film luxuriates in sexual capital and frames Jeanne’s detractors as jealous harpies.
And there is the fact that Maïwenn cast Johnny Depp, no stranger to ugly scandal himself, to play Louis. Looking pallid and tired, Depp haunts the film like a grim specter—he’s not exactly a dashing love interest. To those who remain fans of Depp, I can say that he seems to speak French well. To those no longer enamored of the actor, well, at least Louis gets smallpox and dies.
Despite those ugly associations, Jeanne du Barry is guilty entertainment, preening and ahistorical and basely compelling. In that sense, it succeeds—just as it has succeeded as a ploy for media attention to kick off Cannes with a queasy bang.
Richard Lawson
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