Entertainment

Don’t lose your head

Idea for a new discipline: Take the herstory of a famous event, then put back in the boring kings, political declarations and armies, without any mention of needlepoint or what the scullery maids were thinking. I even have a name for my new field of study: “history.”

“Farewell, My Queen,” a look at the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty through the eyes of an irrelevant midlevel servant (Léa Seydoux) to Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger), is resolute about its approach — which is to avoid almost all of the important stuff, such as why the king and queen are in trouble.

Instead, the film — which begins on July 14, 1789, and mostly takes place over the following three days at Versailles as the peasants are getting huffy in nearby Paris — delivers lots of scenes about what the servant girls were up to: embroidery, nattering about their boyfriends, wondering who is in the queen’s favor (Marie-Antoinette’s friend Gabrielle de Polignac, played by Virginie Ledoyen, is presented as her lover in this fictionalized retelling) and coveting an expensive alarm clock loaned to Sidonie (Seydoux). She frets when the clock goes missing, but since the aristocracy’s heads are about to go missing, her boss finally asks, “Who cares?”

I had the same question for Benoit Jacquot, the director, except unlike his lead character, Jacquot is supposed to stand for something other than a rustle of crinoline and a pretty pout.

There is a certain hushed authenticity about the film and its low-key portrayal of how news breaks into this aggressively closed-off world, with servants loitering in hallways and agonized whispers being exchanged in dim corridors over candlelight. Jacquot captures how a seemingly unimaginable revolution can drip or seep into reality.

But every brief scene of the queen’s emotional deterioration and her stolen moments with Gabrielle makes us wish we were spending more time with them instead of with the dull bystander Sidonie.

Jacquot’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.