FILM OF THE WEEK

Grace Of Monaco Cert: PG Time: 1hr 43mins ★ ★★★★

Almost a month on and it’s still impossible to understand why the makers of Grace Of Monaco allowed it to be the opening film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. I mean, its French director, Olivier Dahan, responsible for the Oscar-winning Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose, and its all-powerful American distributor, Harvey Weinstein, had been arguing over the film for months and the release date had already been postponed. How bad was it going to be?

At Cannes, critics from every corner of the globe duly rushed to report that it was terrible and wondered, at length, whether a worse film had ever opened the festival. To briefly digress, I think worse films have probably won the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s another matter. Grace Of

Monaco had been critically lynched. Now, as it is released into the relative calm of the early cinema summer, the big question is whether it really is as bad as everyone says it is. And the answer is: yup, pretty much. But it’s not a disaster on the scale of Diana, last year’s film about another famous, troubled blonde who died tragically early in a car crash.

That was comically bad, with dialogue that drew guffaws from the audience and a dreadful central performance from a miscast Naomi Watts.

In Grace Of Monaco, by contrast, Nicole Kidman has little to be embarrassed about at all. Her acting is respectable, she looks lovely in the early-Sixties frocks… it’s just a shame she didn’t read the script a little more carefully before she signed on the dotted line.

Indeed, it’s a shame that nobody – Weinstein possibly included – seems to have read the script before it went into production.

There are so many aspects of Grace Kelly’s life that are tailor-made for a fabulous biopic. Her brief but unforgettable career as an actress (she made barely 10 films in just five years), her reportedly scandalous love life, her courting by Prince Rainier, her death…

So it seems almost beyond belief that screenplay writer Arash Amel has somehow chosen to concentrate on one of the most tedious: an obscure chapter of French and Monegasque constitutional history that few will recall and absolutely no one (apart, perhaps, from a few grateful tax-dodging billionaires) will care about.

Then, to make matters worse, by Amel’s own admission, Princess Grace’s involvement in the affair has been largely made up, incurring the wrath of the Grimaldi family in the process. Yet rarely can fact have met fairytale to such tedious

‘It’s almost beyond belief that the plot focuses on an obscure chapter in Monaco’s constitutional history’