A Little Chaos
FILM 10.30PM, BBC4
Alan Rickman’s second and final film as a director is a feel-good but anachronistic costume romp which inserts a fictional character and a modern sensibility into the 17th-century court of French king Louis XIV. Kate Winslet’s proto-feminist gardener, Sabine de Barra, is hired to work on the landscaping of the Palace of Versailles and shakes up the ordered world of the king’s chief landscape artist, André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts), and you won’t be surprised to discover a slow blooming romance between the rivals. The disappointingly stiff Schoenaerts is no match for the soulful Winslet, but the court scenes have spark, with Rickman typically wry as King Louis and Stanley Tucci flamboyantly camp as his brother. JB