The doors fly open, morning light pours in, and the valet announces the visitors in a loud voice. First the family, the heir to the throne, the daughters; then the ducs and the comtes, duchesses and comtesses. When everyone is finally there, the curtain is pulled back: Johnny Depp pads out of the four-poster bed. In a loose, white, baggy sleeping robe. He looks disheveled, worn out inside.
And of course that’s the way it has to be in this scene from “Jeanne du Barry”, this year’s rather exciting Cannes opening film. Because Depp plays Louis XV. in Versailles, the no longer quite young monarchs, a few decades before the great, bloody revolution. Louis does the courtly ritual of his daily getting out of bed (or, if you please, a little more perfectly: le lever du roi) with me for ages now, and his eyes have become so tired from the courtiers passing by, so tired…
But wait, he’s not quite as tired as usual today. A barely perceptible grin crosses his face as his eyes graze the Venetian mirror behind which, as he knows and has commanded, stands, invisible to all others, his new lover: Jeanne du Barry. He wants to amuse her with the nonsense of this ceremonial he has to endure. It works. Jeanne, played by Maïwenn, has to giggle.
Director Maïwenn married director Luc Besson, twice her age, when she was 16
She will learn to struggle through the snakes’ nest of Versailles, much like the first-name actress and director Maïwenn in the French film industry. Both are, in very different ways, survivors. Jeanne du Barry was the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress, a well-known courtesan, and a horror to all Paris moral guardians.
The child actress Maïwenn married director Luc Besson, twice her age, in 1992 when she was 16, and the marriage lasted five years. Her mother, an actress with Algerian roots, sometimes pushed her into auditions against her will, she later said. A journalist who was researching Besson in 2018 – a woman had accused him of rape, other women of sexual assault – she recently spat in public.
That Maïwenn has now become an award-winning director, allowed to spend an estimated €22 million here bringing all the old glory of Versailles to screen, including drone flights over the palace with dramatic orchestral music – isn’t exactly that kind of triumph over all odds, such as Barry was (temporarily) granted at the royal court? In any case, Maïwenn stages it like this: as self-assertion in a crazy world.
Came to the opening of the festival with sunglasses – and was celebrated by fans. It is said that he now also speaks French.
(PHOTO: GONZALO FUENTES/REUTERS)
That’s one level of the film – a story about leaving all abuse behind and gaining a position of power in which you can stroll through the hall of mirrors more beautiful and radiant than ever and the others, who are kicking their ass, show respect and to bow deeply. It’s definitely entertaining, sometimes very funny, the courtesan’s laughter becomes her best weapon against the madness around her.
The only bad thing about it is that Maïwenn takes every agenda from her main character in order to make her appear as pure as possible despite the raging moral guardians. She is constantly the victim of female aggression around her. The king’s daughters, who are enemies with her, and their ally Marie Antoinette, who married the heir to the throne, are portrayed as evil bitches and schemers, even as bad racists. But Madame du Barry bears it all nobly without hitting back. She waits until the king loses patience and speaks a word of power in her favor – but she does not influence him.
The king appears as a man of pure heart – in the end it was true love
And in that, the film is incredibly old-fashioned again, to put it mildly. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s talking about a brutal male power system that forces women into a kind of terror of mutual de-solidarity, while the men in the center are allowed to act as fair and merciful, as complicit and amused. Maïwenn falls into this trap of courtly rules herself by staging almost all other women as furies, but making the king appear as a man with a pure heart despite his constant cheating – in the end it was true love after all.
And this is where the aura that Johnny Depp brings into the film comes into play. Acquitted of domestic violence charges in the United States, this is his first major role since then. Anyone who sided with his ex-wife Amber Heard in the spectacular media trial can only find it scandalous that he was given this opportunity to return, and now this super-celebrity appearance in Cannes. Accordingly, there were very critical questions to the festival director Thierry Frémaux, who resolutely defended his decision with the “freedom of thought, of speech and of acting”.
Maïwenn also portrays Johnny Depp in the role of the king as ridiculous, doughy, worn-out, an aging, irreversible lecher. You’ll hear that the star often clashed with her director on set, and there’s little doubt who came out on top. Still, Depp is effective in the role. And just as one should like the king in the end, France is now apparently coming to the conclusion that one still has to like Johnny Depp, if only, mon dieu, because of the beautiful years with Vanessa Paradis …
Is it good? At the most important film festival in the world, in Cannes? In the blazing limelight? Is it here of all places that we want to continue negotiating whether the men are still the sun kings of a system that all the guillotines in history have been unable to decapitate – and what complex and contradictory role a fighter named Maïwenn plays in this, who has now conquered real power in the film? Well, counter question: Where else please?