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63One of the movie's strengths is how we see the revolution - or, rather the anticipation of it - not from the perspective of royal or radical but courtier and servant.
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88Benoit Jacquot's engrossing film tells a story we know well, seen from a point of view we may not have considered.
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50Benoît Jacquot's film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism.
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90Matching the strength of these actresses and their personal drama is the film's masterful sense of time and place - the way it makes us feel that this was how it was during four pivotal days in July 1789 as the wheels came off the French monarchy.
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60The picture coasts along quite nicely on the strength of its contemplative sensuality, its macaron colors, and the exquisite beauty of its three chief actresses, Léa Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen and Diane Kruger. Oh, and there's nudity in it too, not to mention lesbian undertones – or are they overtones?
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60Whether accurate or not, it's certainly entertaining to watch regal intrigues through the eyes of lady-in-waiting Sidonie (Léa Seydoux). That Jacquot handles the action so lightly is a credit, considering that it takes place during some of the tensest moments of the French Revolution.
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50Jacquot's lavish décor and costumes are like the perfume the women use instead of bathing: They may cover up the willful carelessness at the center of the project, but it's still there.
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75Seydoux, no doubt best known for her kickboxing catfight with Paula Patton in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," gives a quiet, watchful performance, suggesting fealty for her lady but also a strong independent streak.
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100Other films about Marie Antoinette have had their moments, but Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen is the first to give a real sense of what it must have felt like to live inside that palace as the walls were caving in.
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88Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
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88Richly photographed and featuring an attractive cast, Farewell, My Queen is a layer cake of royal pleasures, rote protocols and revolutionary politics. For skeptics who thought this story had grown stale, let them eat their words.
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75Working from Chantal Thomas' novel, Jacquot doesn't entirely scrape the gloss off this love triangle, which plays neither as a florid bodice-ripper nor as emotionally complex as it might have been. It stays on the surface, but at least that surface is gorgeous.
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Jul 10, 201280Historical drama set in the early days of the French revolution is intelligent Euro eye candy at its most lavish.
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90Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.
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50Manages to be both overwrought and strangely lacking in drama, staggering under the deadening weight of an uninvolving central character. It is a shame, because many of the elements were in place for something much more compelling.
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60Once the rote plot takes over - the tension brought on by the film's you-are-there verisimilitude quickly devolves into soapily overwrought theatrics.
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50A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."
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60The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.
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40The story refuses to combust; it's a strangely unsatisfying combination of bloodless observations and unresolved sexuality.
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Jul 26, 201275The foreboding and chaos contrast neatly with the lavish costumes and sets. Versailles takes on the feel of a gilded fortress, behind which the serving class hopes to hide. But money can't buy everything, including, in this case, security.