‘Jeanne du Barry’: Johnny Depp, a smokescreen for a very bad movie

The controversy at the Cannes Film Festival for screening Jeanne du Barry on opening night only served as a smokescreen for the premiere of a film whose artistic merits are scarce. The criticism was aimed mainly at actor Johnny Depp, who had just starred in a high-profile and widely followed defamation trial that pitted him against his ex-partner, Amber Heard. In the movie, Depp plays King Louis XV in a period drama set in Versailles, and all the global conversation about the Depp-Heard trial served to produce a lot of talk about Jeanne du Barry, a movie that signaled the actor’s comeback on the same week that the world learned about his hefty contract with Dior, another French symbol. In stark contrast, there was very little talk about Jeanne du Barry, a hollow, bad film that benefited significantly from the controversy.

Jeanne Du Barry’s problems are numerous. The main one is the lack of chemistry between two characters who give life to a couple in love. In a very questionable decision, Maïwenn LeBesco, director of the film and better known simply as Maïwenn, also plays the leading female role. If, behind the camera, her work can be described as merely correct, in front of the camera it is out of place, and she never onces manages to embody her character. In this way, the audience is not really seeing Jeanne du Barry and Louis XV but Maïwenn and an embalmed Depp who, despite being a much better actor than his co-star, never finds his place in a film full of rigid and imposed emotions.

After directing films as debatable as Polisse (2011), which received accolades at Cannes and where Maïwenn reserved a secondary character for herself, or My King (2015), also rewarded at Cannes, Jeanne du Barry feels like little more than a whim from a director who does not conceal her egomania. Maïwenn is undoubtedly a woman of imposing presence and intriguing personality. She was at the center of another controversy due to her love story with the director Luc Besson, whom she met when she was 12 years old and he was 28, and whom she married aged 16.

Perhaps due to her own character, or perhaps because she is simply far from being a good actress, Maïwenn fails in her role as the king’s lover, and her attempt to impart the film with a modern feminist message reeks of opportunism. Jeanne du Barry was a self-made woman who rose from the underworld to the salons of Versailles, where she challenged the court with her dressing style and her presence. Her kind of assertive personality was infinitely better portrayed by Sofia Coppola in her Marie Antoinette (2006), in which Du Barry was played by Asia Argento and where just two lines of dialogue (“This is ridiculous.” “No, this is Versailles.”) were enough to say more about the society it portrayed than the almost two hours of Jeanne du Barry achieves.

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