BEFORE: Well, I was really making progress on my Netflix queue there for a while, I think I had it down to about 57 movies, which was a vast improvement - but then a few days ago I took a scroll through the recommendations on both Hulu and Netflix (I'd gone through Disney+ and HBO Max last month) and now it's huge again, up over 120. Should keep me busy for a while, provided I can get to most of them before they scroll off the service and end up on Tubi. I just wish Netflix would tell me when each film got added, and when each one is likely to disappear so I could make better plans.
Today's film perfectly fits in with Women's History month, though it seems to be all fictional, I'm not sure someone in the early 1680's would hire a woman to oversee an architectural garden project at Versailles, but let's roll with it. On March 11 in Women's History - Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as the first female president of Chile, and it's the birthday of Margaret Oakley Dayhoff (born in 1925), a pioneer in the fields of mathematics and biochemistry. Also Gale Norton (born in 1954), the first woman appointed as U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
Helen McCrory carries over from "Becoming Jane".
THE PLOT: Two talented landscape artists become romantically entangled while building a garden in King Louis XIV's palace at Versailles.
AFTER: Well, a little research tells me that there was a real André Le Notre, landscape architect and chief gardener for the Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. And of course the king and some of the royal figures depicted here were real, but Madame de Barra seems to be a completely fictional invention for this script. I'm getting really good at smelling B.S. before I fall for it, like those movies that are set in the 1600's or 1700's and depict several people of color among the royals and in their court. I think the recent interview Meghan and Harry had with Oprah is all the proof I need to say, "It just wasn't that way..."
But we're here to hear a story tonight, and for the romance story to be mixed in with the garden construction project, then there sort of needs to be a woman hired as the designer of the project. Le Notre rejects her designs at first, after she botches her interview and doesn't agree with him about gardening being all about creating order out of chaos. Later, the garden becomes a metaphor for a relationship, where two people can grow together like plants and slowly bend each other in a positive direction, similar to the way some people can get plants to grow into certain pleasing shapes. OK, sure, if that's the way you want to look at things - it beats that jewelry metaphor about how everybody's looking for diamonds, and needs to learn to settle for other semi-precious stones instead.
There's also a lot of other dramatic things tied into the story of the construction of the "outdoor ballroom" at Versailles - Mme de Barra is still reeling over the death of her husband and young daughter in a carriage accident, and she's locked those emotions away, but she'll never get closure and be able to move forward until she deals with them. Le Notre is in a somewhat open marriage to Francoise, who sleeps with all the nobles on the French court and claims to be doing this to keep her husband's job secure - but I think maybe she just liked sleeping around. He's also stuck, unless he should happen to develop an attraction to the widowed landscape artist he's hired. And then King Louis has to deal with the sudden death of his queen - sure, he's got a mistress (who doesn't, in this film?) but he comes to realize that's a poor substitute for having a wife who genuinely cares about him. So there's a lot of room for personal growth in this isolated palace setting. Duke Philippe (the king's brother) even lives in a thrupple sort of situation, he's got a wife and a boyfriend and everybody's pretty OK with it - pretty forward for 1680.
King Louis also bonds with Mme. de Barra after she finds him relaxing in his private pear garden, and she mistakes him for the gardener. He's happy to continue the ruse, just to see how the commoners live for a short time, but he can't really turn off the regal attitude, so the jig is up fairly quickly. But since he's the king, he can command her to keep pretending, at least for a little while. This is an interesting plot point, but I'm not sure it rings true, would it really go down like this between a king and one of his subjects? It almost felt like they were setting these two up as a romantic pairing, but of course it could never be that way. This gets Mme. de Barra an invitation to the King's summer home at Fontainebleau, and also leads to André's wife trying to sabotage the fountain portion of the garden project.
I didn't really understand the bit about Mme. de Barra defending the properties of the Four Seasons rose to King Louis while in his court, but Wiki tells me that symbolically, she was putting in a good word for the King's mistress, whom he'd started to lose favor for. OK, thanks for that, but why did everybody have to be so damn obtuse about everything here?
I'm very close to the end of the romance chain now, I'm sort of in mid-transition now to a string of period dramas/European material, which should culminate in an Ireland-set film for St. Patrick's Day. Then the rest of the month will be sort of free-form, with some action movies, crime comedies, two films based on 1970's TV shows, and a film about Abbie Hoffman - only not the one everybody's talking about right now. Should be an interesting month, if nothing else.
Also starring Kate Winslet (last seen in "The Reader"), Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Alan Rickman (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Burlesque"), Steven Waddington (last seen in "The Imitation Game"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Rupert Penry-Jones (last seen in "Match Point"), Paula Paul, Danny Webb (last heard in "Locke"), Phyllida Law (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Pauline Moran, Cathy Belton (last seen in "Philomena"), Morgan Watkins (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "Tolkien"), Adrian Scarborough (last seen in "1917"), Angus Wright (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Alistair Petrie (last seen in "The Duchess"), Henry Garrett, Jamie Bradley, Adam James (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Ben Fox, Mia Threapleton, Lois Wright, Fidelis Morgan, Kristin Milward.
RATING: 5 out of 10 sluice gates
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