Her letters have spanned the centuries, making their author an essential figure in French literature, and yet, Madame de Sévigné’s story has never before been brought to the screen. French director Isabelle Brocard corrects this gap by taking a modern look at the Marquise’s writings and what they reveal about her problematic relationship with her daughter, Madame de Grignan.
On the occasion of a ball in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, somewhere in the middle of the 17the century, the king made advances to the young Françoise de Sévigné in the hope of making her his courtesan. Wishing for her daughter an existence like her own, made up of freedom, luxury and agency, the Marquise de Sévigné asserts herself and instead convinces her to unite with a penniless nobleman, the Count of Grignan (Cédric Kahn). “You will be mistress of your destiny, independent and happy,” she told him.
However, contrary to what her mother had imagined, Françoise falls in love with her husband and leaves the family home to follow him to Provence, where he is governor. There, she has a series of pregnancies and obligations, moving further and further away from the influence that the Marquise seeks to exercise over her. The latter, distraught, then begins a feverish and passionate correspondence – more than 700 letters will be exchanged between the duo over a period of thirty years – which reveals all the torments of a close and devastating relationship.
Shot in the sumptuous settings of the Château de Grignan and other palaces in France, the film is distinguished first and foremost by its grandiose staging, bathed in captivating light, and by its dazzling costumes. Each shot, rather classic in nature, is a feast for the eyes.
Although the screenwriters (Brocard and Yves Thomas) sometimes struggle to find the right tone between the epistolary form and living room conversations, Karin Viard and Ana Girardot, both impeccable, manage to make the text their own and inject a dose of natural to exchanges which, outside the literary field, often escape reason.
By tackling such a complex heroine and a self-referential work, Isabelle Brocard makes the judicious choice of an angle, but loses sight of the way in which the writer’s subjectivity fits into a broader horizon. The story, repetitive and melodramatic, would have benefited from being placed in the political, socio-economic and sexual context, which is only suggested here, which would also have contributed to highlighting the literary dimension of the character.
Where the script choices pay off, it is rather in the way in which they raise questions that are still burning today, in particular on intergenerational relations and the emancipation of women. Isabelle Brocard thus recalls, by focusing on its genesis, all the relevance of a work that is good to rediscover.