Grace of Monaco (2014)

Grace of Monaco arrived in 2014 as a Cannes opening night selection, a Lifetime television premiere in the United States, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a director and a distributor disagree in public. Olivier Dahan intended a portrait of a woman suspended between two lives, a Hollywood star and a princess of a tax haven. Harvey Weinstein intended something closer to The King's Speech. Audiences received a film with a ten percent approval rating and a formal denunciation from the Grimaldi family, who called it needlessly glamorized and historically inaccurate. The palace would not classify it as a biopic. Neither, for that matter, would the director. Nobody involved wished to claim the thing.

The film's defenders, notably at Sight & Sound, argued that the critical dismissals betrayed a discomfort with feminine cinema, and there is a modest case that a woman's crisis of identity and duty deserved more patience than it got. The case is modest because the film resolves that crisis through sacrifice, not through any critique of the arrangement that demanded it. On matters of money, the film asks sympathy for Monaco's revenue arrangements, a curious position for a melodrama to occupy, and critics at the time noticed. Matters of race, sexuality, environment, and bodily self-regard do not appear in the text at all. The court is European, pale, and coutured. This is not a failure of nerve. It is a subject the film never considers.

The remainder is a romance about a woman choosing a role she did not write, played with visible effort by an actress the camera adores. There is no sermon here, no lesson handed down to the audience about how to live. The distortions of the historical record serve the melodrama, which is its own kind of sin but not an ideological one. We classify films for a living, and this one is best filed under costume, not conscience. It plays at being about something. It is mostly about fabric.