Jeanne du Barry film review — Maïwenn stars and Johnny Depp murmurs in vague Versailles drama
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The spiky director Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness) suggested in an interview last week that anyone planning to use a movie camera should need a licence, like a gun owner. The logic may need extending in the wake of French historical biography Jeanne du Barry. A permit should surely be required for this scale of powdered wigs.
Proceed at your own risk, then, with the perfumed study of the famed courtesan and lover of Louis XV. Actor and filmmaker Maïwenn directs herself in the title role; a serene Johnny Depp plays the king, speaking French in a bass murmur. The mode is pointedly classical. Beginning, middle and end all arrive, and very much in that order.
Still, as befits a tale of social climbing, the movie is notably quick to get to Versailles. (It is otherwise not in a hurry at all.)
French historians may have cause to squint, but at least early on, the film’s blank gaze can be persuasive. A marriage to Comte Guillaume du Barry is painted as an exercise in knowing cuckoldry, the French aristocracy offering up their wives to “Louis the Beloved”. Depp is grandly understated as a character used to people hanging on his every gesture.
Installed at Versailles, the heroine is Mean Girled by the king’s mediocre daughters and an easily led Marie Antoinette. But the movie is still endlessly smitten with the splendour of the palace and the glam costumery, much of it created by Chanel, a partner of the production.
Somehow, through it all, Madame du Barry remains an enigma. A vague positioning as a prophet of feminism and social mobility seems a stretch. “Harlotry is better than cooking” is the closest we get to a credo. And for a relationship founded on sex, Maïwenn and Depp spend a lot of time taking tea. Most of the actual biographical detail, meanwhile, comes in voiceover, delivered in the tone of a weary Versailles tour guide, still some way from their next cigarette break.
★★☆☆☆
In UK cinemas from April 19 and US cinemas in May
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