Madame DuBarry

Madame DuBarry manages to be a far better film about a load dramatic rubbish going on during the French Revolution than my potentially least favourite film ever, Les Miserables. It manages this despite being over ten years long and completely devoid of that other stalwart of films everywhere, dialogue. You read correctly, last night I sat down and watched a nigh on two hour long silent German film about some woman who did some stuff during the French Revolution times. I paused it half way through, to have a break, because honestly, it was pretty tough going, and did a little search on a well known search engine whose name rhymes with shaboodle as to the real Madame. Turns out she had a pretty interesting life fannying around in French high society before getting her noggin chopped off by a guillotine – the fully most French of all execution devices by virtue of it being the only one which sounds remotely romantic if you say it with an accent. There is also something about a necklace but to be honest I was not interested enough to read all of that. What I did work out though was that the film seemed to be playing pretty fast and loose with its source material. This is probably by virtue of it being made bloody ages ago when the mere mention of sexy times was sort of frowned upon in the movies. So it really appears that rather a lot of men want to, shall we say, spend time with Madame DuBarry, just because she is rather good looking and all that, never mind that in reality she was probably more, let’s say less delicately, a high class hooker. Anyway, everyone in the film is a complete dick, the men are, DuBarry herself is something of a douche, the rich people are assholes and the poor people are too. Though the latter have the excuse of being oppressed and all that, so in the films climactic storming of the Bastille scene you really don’t mind too much that there is a pretty graphic depiction of a hanged aristocrat. Given its length, age, lack of sound and general depiction of assholes its actually pretty watchable though, I’d certainly not recommend it over, say, Rambo III, but if you want to trick yourself into thinking you are getting some culture, when you are in reality watching a jumped up romance paperback, minus all the good stuff, and with a revolution tacked on the end, you can do a lot worse. Still, infinitely, absolutely and without contest a thousand and one times better than Les Miserables too.