Cannes has a reputation for opening its festival with something dire – Nicole Kidman in Grace being one of the main culprits. It often wants something glamorous (The Great Gatsby) and regularly leans towards French films. Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry is both glamorous and French, but is it dire, as Cannes tradition dictates? Well, no it isn’t, but it isn’t very good either.
The film follows the heroine of the title (played by the mononymous Maïwenn, who also directs) from her bucolic youth as the illegitimate daughter of a friar and a cook, all the way to Versailles and the court of Louis XV (played here by Johnny Depp, no doubt glad to be talking about something other than his former marriage). Educated in a convent at the behest of her mother’s kindly employer Dumonceaux and transformed into a voracious reader of what is surely unsuitable literature for such an establishment, she is eventually, inevitably, booted out.
