A LITTLE CHAOS is a plumb job for Alan Rickman, requiring him to shoot some pretty people in pretty surroundings, then being able to orate and flounce around to his heart’s content when he himself occasionally appears on screen. We are treated to the unexpected joy in hearing him say the word “macaroon”. Sadly he is also responsible for a clumsy and awkward little scene where a mourning King Louis takes an afternoon off to whinge about builders and eat pears.
It is 1682, and King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) commissions a lavish addition to his gardens at Versailles to mark the occasion of his holding court there the following year. For this most important of tasks, the King’s landscape designer André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) trusts in a female designer unknown at court, Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet), inspired by her sheer creativity and the resolute resistance to order she shows in her work.
Ooo, she moved some topiary in her potential employer’s garden off-centre, how chaotic! Despite this clunky introduction to Sabine’s approach to her art, the film does flag up the importance of not imposing order on everything, lest you drain it of life.
Sabine is a lady, but only just. She’s still well out of her depth mingling with those at court. There’s a lovely moment when she is invited to a reception with the King at the Louvre, only to flee at the withering stare of courtiers as she pokes her head round the door. She likes to do everything she can in her work by her own hand and is not just accomplished as a designer of pretty things but also has an understanding of engineering. I liked how practical she is, though it might have been a bit much to show her try to assemble a performance arena almost single-handedly when her workforce deserts her, and later struggling alone with a sluice gate in a howling storm. There’s rolling you sleeves up and getting stuck in, then there’s silliness.
I don’t think that Sabine necessarily needed the past sob story (the set up to which, in flashback, is unfortunately hilarious) to give her motivation – can’t a woman just want to be an artist? Also did this story really need an antagonist working against her, and did it have to be yet another baddie played by Helen McCrory? Both of these additions just smack of artificially pumped-up jeopardy that imbalances the film as a whole.
Stanley Tucci, as always, is a scene-stealer as the King’s high-camp younger brother, self-described, and somewhat understating it as “the other end of the fashion scale” to everyone else (he’s even had some dainty little fabric shoe covers made for the rare occasion when he has to walk through the countryside).
It’s a nice touch that McCrory’s Madame Le Nôtre holds such power over her husband André. He has the fame, the status as an accomplished garden designer and gentleman, but he does not have the necessary skill required to make waves in the right circles. He needs his wife to charm, to speak to the right people and keep his name alive at court otherwise he is nothing.
Sabine De Barra may a fictional character, but who’s to say a woman didn’t have an idea that inspired improvements to the gardens of Versailles? History being male-dominated as it is, it would be unlikely to have been recorded if this were the case, so we can forgive Rickman and co-writers Alison Deegan and Jeremy Brock a little artistic license to make their point.
I loved the details in both the grand and the more everyday settings – the peeling paint, the grime and the dust on windows, paper and implements for eating and writing strewn around every surface, the bizarre methods of European royal autopsies. It all looks lived in and helps to sell the wider world this story is part of.
Gardening as an “act of faith”, always striving to “recreate Eden” is a lovely idea, but one that needs to be handled, narratively speaking, with more delicacy, like you were tending roses, not chopping wood. The film’s pace is leisurely, which is fine, but it feels slow because the interlinking scenes between key moments are inconsequential. We needed more moments of beautiful stillness or a more profound script to make A Little Chaos memorable, as well as a far less awful CG-transition to go out on. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 
Review Embargoes: A Catch-22 for All Involved
To embargo or not to embargo? That is the question. Whether gagging journalists’ criticisms pre-release or simply not showing anyone your product before the big day, it’s a major concern for film studios and their flagship blockbuster products, not to mention their audiences.
Let’s not mince words here, an embargo is rarely a sign of something glorious. Josh Trank’s FANTASTIC FOUR had a review embargo, for all the good it did. With Fox bafflingly gutting the movie before abandoning it by the wayside late in the day, their only real hope for a decent return was to dupe enough viewers into the cinema before word spread. The majority of JJ Abrams projects – CLOVERFIELD, STAR TREK, SUPER 8 – consciously do the same and you can put money on him clinging to the same strategy for STAR WARS, whether it’s turned out good or bad. Most horror films aren’t screened for critics prior to release, though this is arguably more to do with the perceived critical disdain for the modern genre as a whole. Marvel, on the other hand, don’t seem to mind if word gets out early, which either indicates unshakable confidence in their product or a certain arrogance. Marvel do have the small matter of most of their films being released in Europe before they are stateside due to Disney’s distribution deals, so you can’t imagine even the world’s most powerful studio could silence or sue every critic across the pond until the home release comes around.
While prominent figures in the industry like Abrams have argued for a “mystery box” approach to film marketing (the admirable aim of preserving the surprise of viewing the film for the first time by revealing as little as possible ore-release), you’ve also got to understand that journalists have a job to do. Yes, they shouldn’t say in their early review that *sigh* SPOILER Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father or that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, or more recently and less relevant that Benedict Cumberbatch is actually Khan, but they should be able to inform their readers/viewers and, since they often see films earlier than most, they should be free to write a detailed and well-argued review prior to public release.
The theory behind review embargoes is to get bums on seats before bad word of mouth spreads, to recoup as much of your failed movie as possible in a short space of time. But surely you’re shooting yourself in the foot if an embargo is nearly always the sign that a film studio has no faith in a movie, that it is unable to survive on its own merits. Just releasing a bad movie, especially one part of an established franchise with a built-in audience would probably still result in breaking even. After all, there are plenty of audience members out there who say, “who cares what the critics think?”
Personally, I try not to read too many reviews of films before I see them simply because I write my own and don’t want my opinion too coloured. As I’m not a professional, I’m seeing movies at the same time as everyone else. The vast majority of viewers have no such restrictions and should actively seek out as many different reviews as possible to make an informed choice of which film to pay to see. If they are unable to access any information beyond studio-sanctioned PR before they’re buying a ticket, how fair is that?
I know we don’t live in an ideal world and dirty marketing tricks are very much part of the Hollywood film business, but film studios really need to stop trying to blind-side their audiences and just make good movies. That way the futile act of having review embargoes will die all by itself. To embargo or not embargo? It’s not a question really. SSP