French Revolution drama kicks off Berlin film festival

AFP/Berlin

French actress Léa Seydoux, German actress Diane Kruger and French actress Virginie Ledoyen pose for photographers during the photocall for the film Farewell My Queen (Les adieux à la Reine) yesterday in Berlin

Diane Kruger opened the 62nd Berlin film festival yesterday with Farewell My Queen, an erotically and politically charged drama about a lovelorn Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution.The picture, which attracted only a lukewarm response at a press preview, features Kruger as the doomed young monarch in the final frantic hours of Louis XVI’s court at Versailles in July 1789 as armed peasants massed at the gates.The German-born Hollywood actress leads a French cast that includes Lea Seydoux, who appeared in last year’s Woody Allen hit Midnight in Paris, and Virginie Ledoyen, best known abroad for her turn in The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio.The three form an unexpected love triangle with the queen smitten with a manipulative countess at court (Ledoyen) and adored by one of her servants (Seydoux) – Marie Antoinette’s blue-blooded husband is barely an afterthought.When the queen tries to convince her servant to disguise herself as the countess to save her lover’s life, the girl must decide where her loyalties lie.Kruger brushed aside a question whether she was playing cinema’s first “lesbian Marie Antoinette” but said that she could identify with her as a foreign woman living in a world of splendour.“Some think she was a poor little party girl that was put in a situation that she was just overwhelmed by,” she said, perhaps recalling Sofia Coppola’s much-maligned Marie Antoinette.“Others think she was a terrible queen and spoiled and rotten. I was trying to not judge her ... I could relate to her as a woman.”The French-Spanish co-production directed by Benoit Jacquot is one of 18 pictures vying for the Golden Bear top prize at the first major European film festival of the year.Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said he chose the film for the opening in part due to the parallels it draws with today’s popular uprisings including the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” movement against gross inequality of wealth.“It’s been a year since (Egyptian leader) Hosni Mubarak was driven out of office and I suspect that the last 48 hours that he and the other despots had didn’t look much different than Marie Antoinette’s,” Kosslick told reporters.Jacquot said Kruger, who speaks French with a slight German accent throughout the movie, was the obvious choice to play the Austrian-born monarch.“I wanted a foreigner and Diane happens to have similar roots to the queen, she is blonde like her and about the same age,” about 35, he told AFP. But above all, Kruger had a “desire for this role that was so passionate that she was irresistible to me”.Last year’s Golden Bear went to the harrowing Iranian family drama A Separation by Asghar Farhadi, which is now nominated for two Academy Awards.Farhadi is on the jury, led by British director Mike Leigh and including actors Jake Gyllenhaal, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbara Sukowa, photographer Anton Corbijn, director Francois Ozon and writer Boualem Sansal.Leigh said festivals such as Berlin helped level the playing field between Hollywood and smaller productions.“There is world cinema and there is Hollywood, and I feel personally, for the first time ever, one can begin to be a little bit confident that the inevitable domination of Hollywood over world cinema is diminishing,” he said.Hollywood, however, will also be out in force during the 11-day event in the frigid German capital.Meryl Streep will pick up an honorary Golden Bear for her life’s work and the festival will show the top films of her acting career culminating in a gala screening of her new Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady.And Angelina Jolie is to present her directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, a Bosnian drama about rape as a weapon of war, and take part in an audience discussion after the screening.Meanwhile her ex-husband, US actor and film-maker Billy Bob Thornton, will premiere the Vietnam War-era drama Jayne Mansfield’s Car in the competition.