Farewell, My Queen Reviews
Top Critic
Jacquot has chosen wisely in casting Léa Seydoux in the key role of Sidonie, whose luminous but watchful eyes suggest a soul wise beyond her years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The details of the plot are unimportant: that is the main point made by the skillful director, Benoît Jacquot. It is the slowness with which they realize what is happening that fascinates.
Although it was shot at Versailles, and its actors are dressed to the 18th-century nines, Farewell, My Queen has a loose, reportorial intimacy about it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
As we follow her through the monarchy's abrupt collapse, "Farewell, My Queen" gives us intimate, unflaggingly energetic history as seen from the servants' quarters.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The foreboding and chaos contrast neatly with the lavish costumes and sets.
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| Original Score: 3/4
We know what will happen, of course, but Jacquot still manages to create tension, as well as a semi-soap opera, among the let-them-cake-eaters of post-Enlightenment France.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Farewell, My Queen" is worth a look simply for its look.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The guillotine's blade is, as yet, nowhere to be heard. But you can feel Jacquot's pleasure is slicing and dicing this material in novel ways.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Jacquot takes a refreshingly understated approach to costume drama, avoiding historical generalizations to focus on the particulars of palace life and the psychological states of individual characters.
Benoit Jacquot's engrossing film tells a story we know well, seen from a point of view we may not have considered.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a strangely unsatisfying combination of bloodless observations and unresolved sexuality. But Diane Kruger's queen, a mature beauty mourning the loss of her youth, is a vivid portrait of willfulness, childishness and genuine neediness.
Just in time for Bastille Day! -- this is a nice corrective to the new-wave madness of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Matching 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Deftly captures the sense of impending revolution from within the mirrored halls of Versailles.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Farewell, My Queen has some routine period-drama moments, but at its boldest it foretells a time when a single girl can be a free woman.
Think of it as eating a rather rich piece of cake - even if the real Marie Antoinette never actually did suggest anything of the kind.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Farewell, My Queen was shot in Versailles, but its flat schematism only highlights that the backdrops had a better story to tell.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Jacquot ... turns his audience into Peeping Toms, limiting our views of Her Majesty and her entourage in accordance with where Sidonie happens to be at a given moment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.
A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama.
Jacquot gazes avidly at this closed-in world of women; if his camera pressed any closer to them, it would be subcutaneous.
Jacquot injects a welcome shot of immediacy into the costume drama proceedings with an off-center vantage point and dynamic camerawork.
Historical drama set in the early days of the French revolution is intelligent Euro eye candy at its most lavish.
