Baroque costume dramas seemed to be all the rage back in the 80s and early 90s. This one takes its inspiration from real life person, Italian noble woman Jeanne de Luynes. She became a mistress of Vittorio Francesco, the King of Piedmont. This is a story about the use fear of power and its inability to make a person love you and also the servants fear of their rulers power to annihilate them with the wink of a hand, if he does not get his way. That was not just a problem around 1700, but it is an eternal problem, the illusion of authority.
Jeanne is happily married to Comte di Verua, but when they court the King, the King falls deeply (and madly) in love with the very young woman. She resists his overtures at first, but pressure from her husband to comply and everyone else's desire to keep the king happy, puts pressure on her to accept the kings wishes. She gives in, while clearly showing him, that she despises him and that she think of herself as his whore. While the king spends all his energy on her, particularly while she has a dangerous skin disease, the kingdom looses a war and his power seem to fade as he gets more and more obsessed with her. While she has found more sympathy for the King, she finally sees an opportunity to get out of the situation, with the help of her husband and family.
Basically this story has a great potential to become a grand and sweeping experience on the silver-screen, but sadly, it does not deliver. The greatest problem is Valeria Golino, who plays Jeanne. She is a second rate actor, maybe even a third rate dilettante to be honest. She has no emotional depth at all, she speaks bad english and she sounds like she has no talent or at least no training in acting (or both). She is pretty though and has a perfect body, and i suppose the casting routine bet its money on that aspect entirely. What makes her stick out even more like a sore thumb, is the powerful and almost Shakespearean performance by Timothy Dalton, who plays the King. The disparity in abilities is so obvious and I can almost feel the desperation Dalton must feel acting against such an amateur. This movie would have been so much better had they used a great actor for the female lead instead. The flow of the story seems very uneven at times and some scenes are very low quality, with shots against the sunlight causing a dimmed picture or a scene like when she is in a gondola, they row it so fast that the camera almost cannot hold up filming alongside, on the shore. Other scenes like the sword-fight in the last part is really good, one of the most energetic and realistic ones i have seen. I have the notion that it was severely cut down in runtime to fit a standard length, and that was done so badly so that the parts are not balanced very well.
This movie is not a complete failure, it has its charms here and there, and a solid and powerful performance by Dalton. But its shortcomings burdens its ability to become engaging in my opinion. If you are into costume movies of this time period, i suppose it could be a bit of fun, but i have minimum standards, especially for the quality of the actors, and this one is too burdened by bad acting.
Rating: 3/10
