Available on DVD: “Farewell My Queen”

Farewell, My Queen, Benoit Jacquot’s tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch, opens with a young woman shaking off sleep and scratching mosquito bites on her arm. It’s a lovely arm, as no less than Marie Antoinette (the well-cast Diane Kruger) proclaims. The young woman is Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux, fittingly recessive), who serves as the queen’s reader. Smitten as well as bitten, Sidonie adores the queen and luxuriates in her good graces. Sidonie also reads plays, novels and even fashion magazines to the queen as Marie Antoinette lazes in her bed at Versailles, pretty as a Fragonard picture while France violently seethes.

France hadn’t fully erupted when Sidonie wakes at dawn on July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille fell. For Sidonie, the morning seems like any other with an early rise, a splash of lavender water and a jittery dash to the queen’s quarters. On her way Sidonie slips to the ground, suggesting her subservience and foreshadowing the greater fall to come. As usual in this deftly handled movie, Jacquot doesn’t linger on the obvious, in this case her tumble, but cuts to Sidonie looking around, as if to see if anyone has noticed. At Versailles etiquette was all. And "life at court," the 17th-century moralist Jean de La Bruyère wrote, "is a serious, melancholy game."

It’s a game that grows progressively more dangerous as the minutes race by in this efficiently plotted movie, which was written by Jacquot and Gilles Taurand and based on a novel by the French writer Chantal Thomas. It seems possible that Jacquot also dipped into Thomas’s Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, a cultural history that explores the mythifying of the queen largely through the pamphlets written about her. Widely disseminated before the revolution and even after heads began rolling, the pamphlets started off as fairly benign, more Us Weekly than Foreign Affairs — Marie Antoinette’s imperial bouffant was mocked along with her manners — but later become more pointed and politically expedient.

By 1789 the tone of the pamphlets had turned, in Thomas’s words, "from laughter to reprobation." Marie Antoinette was attacked from nose tip to toe, her body becoming a symbolic site of battle. Specifically it was a foreign (she was Austrian), increasingly sexualized body that, as the antiroyalist rhetoric heated up, became perversity incarnate. She was accused of participating in orgies and carrying on with other women. (At her trial in 1793 she was also accused of incest with her son.) The author of one pamphlet feverishly wrote that her mirrors multiplied "all the finer points of her venereal gymnastics." The propagandistic usefulness of the tracts was as naked as the queen’s lust was said to be, as in the 1789 screed The Austrian Woman on the Rampage, or the Royal Orgy.

Not for nothing does Jacquot set the movie’s first major sequence in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Versailles, using it as a stage to introduce some of the larger dramas unfolding at the palace. This set piece opens shortly after Sidonie takes her introductory spill. Her dress muddied, she runs up the stairs to the queen’s bedroom, only to be scolded for her tardiness by Madame Campan (Noémie Lvovsky, a sly scene stealer), the tremulously watchful lady-in-waiting. As they are about to enter the chamber, a third woman, later identified as Gabrielle de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen), loudly flounces out of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom without casting a single look at the hovering women and guards. Palace rumor has it that this is the queen’s lover, and she plays the court game well.

If the rules and the players of this continuing, increasingly dangerous court intrigue remain obscure, it’s because Farewell, My Queen is told through Sidonie’s eyes. She isn’t a privileged witness to history (or an all-knowing character), but she’s resourceful. Tapping her palace sources, notably an archivist (Michel Robin) and a dressmaker (Anne Benoît), Sidonie learns of news known only to the nobility and their trusted stewards: that the Bastille has been seized. "What will happen to us?" she asks, eyes wide. Her limited knowledge combined with what history tells us (even in foggy memory) invests the movie with the shiver of a murder mystery. Like everyone else she doesn’t have the answer to that question, but the fear in their faces suggests that they already know.

This is the first of Jacquot’s movies to be released on DVD in the United States in several years, and it’s a welcome return. (His films include A Single Girl, with the teenage Ledoyen.) Jacquot has always been a sensitive director of actresses, his sympathies evident in his caressing, sometimes ogling camerawork and the time and space he gives women and their stories. That sympathy is evident here too, though crucially, while he doesn’t demonize Marie Antoinette, he doesn’t turn her into a spurious feminist martyr. He tends not to trumpet his politics; he does brandish a few dead rats, some of Versailles’s other inhabitants. But because he shows you what Sidonie sees in the queen — and what the queen sees in Gabrielle — he finds truths beyond the era’s misogynist propaganda.

Farewell, My Queen has none of the mustiness or preciosity that can turn costume dramas into waxworks. Jacquot shot much of it at Versailles, which deepens the period verisimilitude, yet while the gilded rooms and satin clothes look sumptuous if often suitably absurd, almost clownish, the people in them breathe. That’s even true in several stunning scenes when the palace nobles, having heard the bad news from Paris, wander the halls in a daze, their bodies shadowed by the wavering candlelight, their unanswered servant bells ringing. Jacquot isn’t seeking pity for these walking dead — the movie is neither a political argument nor a trivializing fantasy — but, as he does with Marie Antoinette, he grants them a kind of measured absolution just by recognizing their humanity.