Quick, students of French history: What springs to mind when you think of Marie Antoinette, aside from the probably inaccurate line attributed to her about letting them eat cake?
Even before the doomed queen lost her head in the French Revolution, she was a controversial figure, known for her lavish, boundary-pushing fashion sense — think 3-foot-high pink wigs, and cleavage-enhancing, ankle-baring dresses (quel scandale!). She was also known for her strong opinions, aside from the cake quote.
In the new French movie “Farewell, My Queen,” Marie Antoinette is played by German actress Diane Kruger, who, like her character, is known for her perfectly honed (and occasionally outrageous) sartorial sensibility. (She counts Karl Lagerfeld as a personal friend as well as next-door neighbor in Paris.) And, as The Post discovered, she too has strong opinions; whether she would share them with us was another matter.
So who better to fill the queen’s pointy, beribboned slippers?
When Kruger — best-known for her German-actress spy role in 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” — first signed on to play the part, the overlap between the two was striking, she told The Post.
“She was from Austria, and I’m from Germany,” says Kruger, who speaks French and English fluently, in addition to her native tongue. “The movie takes place on July 15, 16, 17, and I was born on July 15. She came to Paris at pretty much the age I did [15], and she was taken from Versailles at pretty much the age I am now [35]. And my mother’s name is Marie-Therese, like her mother’s.
“It was just a bizarre coincidence,” she says. “I had never thought, ‘Oh, I should play Marie Antoinette.’ When Benoit [Jacquot, the director] sent me the script, I was just like, ‘Wow, this is coming to me at this time in my life.’ ”
The movie, based on the 2003 novel by Chantal Thomas, takes place at the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. It focuses on the relationship between the increasingly panicked queen and her reader, Sidonie (played by Léa Seydoux), a young girl from a lower-class background who has a bit of a girl crush on the dazzling monarch.
The queen, meanwhile, is embroiled in a probable love affair with a duchess in the court. And each day when Sidonie arrives to serve, she encounters a different persona. “She’s quite borderline,” says Kruger of her Marie Antoinette. “She’s so different from scene to scene. The mood swings are quite extreme.”
Did Kruger, we wondered, feel the queen was unjustly vilified by the French, as had been suggested by some scholars?
“You know, I don’t want to express my personal opinions about Marie
Antoinette,” she says. “I’ve always been really neutral about her in interviews. I have my opinion, but it doesn’t really matter what I think.”
(Right. Probably best not to dive too far into a 220-year-old controversy.)
Moving on to fashion, then: Kruger, whose ever-evolving style reliably exudes European glamour, was brought into the creative process as the costume designers for “Farewell, My Queen” assembled her wardrobe. “They let me choose a lot of the fabrics and the colors,” she says. But the outfits in this movie don’t necessarily reflect Marie Antoinette at her most fashionable.
“The movie looks gorgeous, but a little grotesque, as well,” Kruger says. “In those days there was less money, so she had to reuse fabrics and rework old dresses into the new ones. So the color palette is a little passé. It’s not quite at the height of the glory of her reign.”
Kruger, on the other hand, is definitely at the height of the glory of her reign. A favorite of fashion mags for looking effortlessly fashionable — even when snapped just hanging out with her longtime boyfriend, actor Joshua Jackson — the actress does not employ a personal stylist, unlike just about everyone else in her profession.
“I mean, I have a fashion background, so it’s not that hard,” says Kruger, a former model who made her American film debut playing mythical beauty Helen in 2004’s “Troy.”
“I think sometimes people think about fashion as superficial, but it’s the first impression someone will have of you,” she says. “It’s a direct expression of who you are, or how you want to be perceived. It’s not about the label, or the red carpet. That doesn’t matter to me so much. It’s another facet of who you are. So you might as well be fearless and have fun with it.”
Antoinette, one imagines, would give that sentiment an enthusiastic “Oui!”