Rats appear often Sidonie scratches at her mosquito bites and it’s always fun to see people in big long skirts fall over, and as a factor of her youth and lack of sophistication, Sidonie does that a lot. An interesting upstairs/downstairs dynamic emerges, in which less time is spent in sparkly chandeliered halls than in grimy passageways, spartan quarters, and on unadorned staircases. Unusual, too, is the depiction of court life.
Her Marie Antoinette is selfish, vain and capricious, to be sure, but here she is also capable of a sweetness and consideration that, while it ultimately serves her manipulative ends, helps us understand how Sidonie could fall so hard. Comparisons with Kirsten Dunst‘s version of the same role are inevitable, but it is to her credit that Kruger, an actress this writer has found lacklustre in the past, does as much with her few scenes as Dunst did with a whole film in terms of creating a believable portrait. Chief among them is Diane Kruger‘s performance as the titular Queen. This is a pity, because there are some unusual elements here which, better developed and arranged around a more interesting character, could have elevated the film into the upper ranks of the royalty costume drama (to the level of, say, “ Elizabeth” or “ La Reine Margot“). And later, when an ill-judged voiceover suddenly lets us into Sidonie’s head for a moment, it is just to let is know that she is “no one.” At a certain point, this mysteriousness stops being enigmatic and starts to frustrate, as our imagination is given too few footholds, too few pieces of the Sidonie puzzle to stay interested. When Sidonie is called on it by her chatty maidservant friend (“We don’t know anything about you…who are you? Do you even have parents?”), Sidonie’s reply is typical: she says nothing. That this absence is a deliberate choice and not an accident of underwriting is clear. That she only truly comes alive in the presence of her adored Queen, and has an almost stalker level of focus on the object of her affection we understand, but we are also asked to care for her, and without any sense of why she totally subsumes herself and defines herself through another, that becomes increasingly difficult.
In the role, Lé a Seydoux is more watchable than her character deserves, but even her sulky, sometimes sly pout, and wary watchfulness cannot compensate for the vacuum where a personality should be. Sidonie is obsessively in love with her Queen - just one of two central female-on-female loves the film features - devotedly loyal and entirely blind to her faults until Her Majesty’s final monstrous betrayal strips the veil from her eyes. The empty hole where the heart and soul of the picture should be is Sidonie LaBorde, a young woman of the household whose job is to recommend books from the library and read aloud to the Queen.
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