‘Jeanne du Barry’ Film Review: Cannes Fuss Over Johnny Depp Overwhelms an Inert Period Piece
thewrap.com“Aren’t girls who care for nothing ready for anything?” and “What good is innocence if others harbor guilty desires for you?” In a way, the movie came out of another Cannes premiere in which a different female director and American actor took the story of the 18th century French court and twisted it.
In 2006, Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” played at the festival with Kirsten Dunst as the doomed queen. It famously drew scattered boos — and it also introduced Maïwenn, an actress just beginning her directing career, to the character of Jeanne Vaubernier, the illegitimate daughter of a monk and a cook who would become a mesmerizing libertine and lover to the Compte du Barry and then to Louis XV, who installed her in Versailles as his favorite.
If Coppola was tempting the Cannes boobirds with her ultra-modern indie-rock take on French history, Maïwenn is flying in the face of today’s culture by casting Depp, an actor who is persona non grata in many circles.
It’s hard to say that Depp’s performance justifies the fuss, because the movie’s all about Jeanne, not Louis; we see him through her eyes, and he spends much of the movie lounging in opulent settings without really doing much. (At times it seems as if his hair, alternately a royal wig and a stringy mess that reveals the real Louis, does most of the acting.)Particularly after the death of Louis’ wife and the mother of his children, Jeanne’s presence in the court is an affront to the established order.
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