Versailles (2008) - film review

Homeless and jobless, a young woman, Nina, lives on the streets of Paris with her five-year old son, Enzo.  In the woods near to the palace of Versailles, she comes across a small hut, which is home to Damien, a young man who has turned his back on the world.   Damien allows Nina and Enzo to spend the night with him, but in the morning Nina has disappeared, leaving the infant in his care...

In his remarkable debut feature, writer-director Pierre Schöller delivers a film for our time - a powerful indictment of a society that blithely allows a disparity of monumental proportions to exist between the richest and the poorest.  The film’s most potent image, that of a solitary ragamuffin boy running about the luxuriant gardens and grandes salles of Versailles, is a cogent visual metaphor for a social malaise which still prevails and which seems to worsen with every passing year.   Schöller’s film provides a timely reminder that the problem of homelessness and social exclusion continues to blight our soi-disant civilised society and remains an issue that needs to be tackled with seriousness and urgency, something that our elected political leaders are somewhat loathe to do (presumably because there are few votes at stake).

If Versailles were merely a hard-edged social critique, its impact would be limited.  What makes the film so appealing and so effective in conveying its message is that it takes an important social theme and develops this into an extremely compassionate human drama, one that is crafted with poetry, warmth and a genuine concern for the plight of those who, through no fault of their own, end up living on the margins of society.  Julien Hirsch’s inspired use of chiaroscuro cinematography underscores the stark division that exists between those who have and those who have not, the latter being driven into the shadows to fend as best they can whilst the better off bask in the sunshine of prosperity, ignorant of their good fortune and the misery that lies in their midst.  

The film’s emotional heart lies in the heartrending rapport between the two central characters, the vagabond Damien and the abandoned child Enzo, both portrayed with a startling authenticity by Guillaume Depardieu and Max Baissette de Malglaive.  In the decade that preceded this film, Depardieu led a troubled existence, wasted by drug and alcohol abuse and often in trouble with the law.  He emerged from these personal crises with fortitude and in the years before his untimely death in 2008 he earned a reputation as one of France’s most accomplished screen actors.   Guillaume Depardieu’s performance in Versailles is easily among his finest, an uncompromising mélange of brutality and tenderness that serves the film’s subject admirably, whilst bearing testimony to the immense loss that French cinema suffered when he was taken from us, aged 37.

© James Travers 2010

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