Kate comes up ROSES
Alan Rickman’s budding romance set in the gardens of Versailles is a bit Dangerous Liaisons without the sex, but...
Back in the mid-Eighties, Alan Rickman made his name playing the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton’s popular stage version of Les Liaisons
Dangereuses but, despite dazzling audiences in London’s West End and on Broadway, he never got to play the pre-revolutionary French roué in a film. That privilege fell to John Malkovich in Stephen Frears’s production, Dangerous Liaisons in 1988, and, somewhat more improbably, to a then only 29-year-old Colin Firth in Milos Forman’s Valmont in 1989.
But Rickman did not sulk. At the time, he consoled himself by going off to play the career-redefining role of Hans Gruber in the first Die
Hard film. And now, a quarter of a century later, any lingering disappointments are surely laid well and truly to rest, not once but twice. For in his latest film, A Little Chaos, he doesn’t muck about with mere vicomtes: Rickman gets to play King Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, and he directs too. The result – a cross between Dangerous Liaisons and PeterGreen away’s The Draughtsman Contract but with less sex and more mud – may not bear the most rigorous historical scrutiny but it’s elegant, witty, very nicely acted and as entertaining as it is gently touching.
Kate Winslet leads the way playing Sabine de Barra, a woman struggling to establish herself in the male-dominated world of French landscape gardening in the late 17th century. At the time (at least according to the film), French horticultural fashion was for order, symmetry and strict formality, but, as the film’s title suggests, Madame de Barra prefers a little chaos.
Her unfashionable views, not to mention her habits of cleaning her fingernails by candlelight, clearing undergrowth with a billhook and even wielding a mallet when the occasion demands, would appear to make her long-odds to win the contract to design part of the new gardens being built – on the King’s express orders – at the Palace of Versailles.
But then the King’s unhappily married landscape architect, André le Nôtre, who is overseeing the Versailles project and has the contract in his gift, lays eyes on Sabine and we’re all pretty sure that the horticultural fates are about to intervene. And so it proves – Sabine gets the contract for the Rockwork Garden but will she get – indeed, does she even want – the man too?
Pedants will point out that Sabine is a madeup character, a fictional and very modern-day woman parachuted into a historical setting by screenwriter Alison Deegan. But as long as we don’t take the whole thing as some sort of gospel truth, I don’t see that as a problem. This is a film that has been made to amuse and move; not necessarily to historically inform.
Indeed, Rickman has gone out of his way to make it as accessible as possible, with dialogue delivered in unaccented English but often in modern, colloquial form too. ‘I remember the day of your marriage,’ says Sabine in one scene in which she has mistaken the King for his gardener and, too late, realises her error.
‘I hope so,’ drawls Louis, who had been rather enjoying surveying her hardy perennials, ‘it cost enough.’ Winslet is always watchable as Sabine, a woman desperately trying to make sense of an aristocratic world she knows little about and haunted by past tragedy.
Stealing every scene he’s in, however, is Rickman, who we know will make Louis louche, dry and world-weary but also endows him with a restrained warmth. ‘We have grown too old for jokes,’ he reminds Le Nôtre, fearful that Sabine’s garden design will make him a target for mockery.
Later, in one of the most moving scenes, Sabine bravely reminds the King that it is not their fault that many of his high-born former mistresses have grown old too.
Given that Winslet turns 40 this year and Rickman, somewhat unbelievably, is fast approaching 70, this is definitely a film made with a mature audience in mind.
There are weaknesses – it’s a little slow, doesn’t look quite as French as it might, despite the best efforts of England’s great houses such as Ham House, Blenheim Palace and Hampton Court. And the Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, while undeniably looking the handsome part as Le Nôtre, doesn’t always provide the screen presence that the underlying romance requires.
But there are some lovely supporting performances – look out for Helen McCrory as the scheming Madame le Nôtre, Rupert Penry-Jones as a particularly charming courtier, and an outrageous Stanley Tucci as a camp Duc d’Orléans – and, despite a melodramatic stumble or two, it all comes up roses in the end.