Jeanne du Barry (2023)

Jeanne du Barry arrives with the ceremonial weight of a Cannes opening night and the peculiar gravity of a film that knows exactly what it is. Maïwenn directs, co-writes, produces, and stars as the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress who claws her way to the right hand of Louis XV. Johnny Depp, speaking French and saying very little, plays the king as a tired man who has run out of appetite for everything except this one woman. The film is modeled on Barry Lyndon and Marie Antoinette, which is to say it observes more than it explains. Dialogue is spare. Candles do the lighting. It is a costume drama that behaves.

A woman director centering a woman who navigates a court built by and for men carries a mild charge of its own, though the film treats it as romance, not argument. The casting is white European throughout, with one exception: Zamor, the page from Bengal gifted to Jeanne, played by two young actors. His presence is historically documented and entirely period-accurate, which is a polite way of saying it is not a diversity initiative. Race is never interrogated. He ends the film by betraying Jeanne to the Revolution, and the film does not pause to consider what that might mean. Class resentment simmers underneath, since Jeanne is a commoner performing aristocracy, but the guillotine at the end reads as tragic fate, not economic critique.

There is no environmental sermon, no body-positivity subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no queer thread. Maïwenn admits to liberties with the record, though the result is a conventional biopic, not a reframing. The film never lectures. It simply waltzes, heavily coiffed, toward the scaffold.