Oeuvre_Klika

This movie was as pretentious and empty as its titular menu.

I enjoy dark humor and satire, which it is supposed to be, but I found it neither funny nor clever.

At first, it was intriguing enough, but after a while I suspected that I wouldn't see anything more interesting than this surface intrigue. I was tempted to stop watching halfway through, but decided to wait and see if the movie had something more interesting to say in its second half. It didn't and it was a chore to watch it to the end.

I was simply bored, which is the worst feeling to have in front of a movie.

I would give it a lower score if it wasn't so beautifully filmed.

This movie takes us to witness the weird intricacies of royal marriages of old. This story (based on a book I haven't read) is a great idea and could make a great movie, but I was a bit disappointed by the result.

The movie lacks flair and I feel it might mostly be an editing and direction problem. Scenes just follow one another like it's an animated picture book. It's never really clear what the movie wants to say to us besides "look, this story happened". It is a good story, but not enough to make it a great movie.

The tone isn't very consistent. A lot of the movie plays as a comedy, as it shows the ridiculousness of the social rules of the time. At the beginning, I wasn't sure this comedic tone was intentional. Now, I do think it was, but, at the same time, the rest of the movie has a such a somber tone... instead of feeling like a dramedy, it rather looks like the director wasn't sure of what he wanted.

The actors are all great. I especially liked Igor van Dessel as Louis XV and Juliane Lepoureau as the Infanta. Thomas Mustin gloriously overacts as the Duke of Condé. I couldn't say I didn't like it, but it's a jarring contrast to the seriousness of all the other actors. Similarly, Anamaria Vartolomei plays Louise-Elizabeth as a very modern teenager, while everyone around her adopts more historical manners (that contrast may have been intentional, but I didn't like it). So, again, it looks like the director wasn't sure of what he wanted from his actors.

All in all, if you're interested in movies about the "Ancien Régime", like I am, you'll probably find a lot to enjoy in this movie. But you won't find a masterpiece. The costumes and the sets are beautiful and make for a good immersion into that time. I couldn't speak about the historical accuracy: I only noticed that they aged up the four children by a few years. It definitely looked historically accurate, but viewed through the lens of our modern age, where such marriage practices look at best absurd.

6.5/10.

I'm not against the use of a narrator in a movie by principle. Narration can be useful to set context, or, even better, have an interesting dialogue with the action. However, I struggle to understand what the writers of this movie were thinking when they decided that every beat of this story needed narration. I felt like I was reading a picture book. It really diminished my enjoyment of the movie. Too bad, because it's a good story, served by excellent actors (I particularly loved Salomé Dewaels) and beautiful costumes and sets. A lot of the narration could have been cut by being more creative with the script and telling us things in different ways, or by simply leaving a few things unsaid and trusting the audience to cope with some ambiguity.

I'm frankly baffled by the fact that it won the "best movie" and "best adapted scenario" César awards (admittedly, I haven't seen its competition).

Also, the little nods to our present time, mostly done by that same narration, were very unsubtle. In a better film, I might have funnier, but there they tended to annoy me.