Olivier Dahan (2014)
There’s a symmetry of sorts between the careers of Diana Spencer and Grace Kelly. Diana married into royalty then acquired a kind of glamour more traditionally associated with old-style Hollywood icons. Grace Kelly, at the height of her fame as a film star and actress, abandoned movies to become the wife of Prince Rainier of Monaco. The two women now share posthumously the dubious distinction of being the subjects of biopics both execrable and execrated even before they opened, in British cinemas anyway. A difference between the pre-release mayhem around Diana and Grace of Monaco is that the latter has been the subject of a long-running public dispute between Olivier Dahan and Harvey Weinstein, the film’s US distributor, and was savaged in the glare of international publicity at Cannes, where it was chosen, almost perversely, to open this year’s festival.
Grace of Monaco is the kind of film in which Aristotle Onassis is played by Robert Lindsay and one of the mock-up front pages of newspapers from 1962, covering the rumours of Grace Kelly’s return to the screen to play the title role in Marnie, refers to Hitchcock as Hithcock. Bad as it is, though, I was surprised by what kind of movie it turns out to be. Olivier Dahan has been quoted as saying it isn’t a biopic – that he hates biopics generally. This is rich coming from the man whose best-known picture is La Vie en Rose but he’s right in a way. Grace of Monaco is a weird hybrid: it’s partly character study (apart from a prologue describing her departure from Hollywood, the action spans only a few months of Grace Kelly’s life) and partly a political melodrama. When the story gets underway, you quickly get the message that the heroine is frustrated by, and feels trapped in, the role of Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. But what follows isn’t the fairytale-marriage-becoming-a-nightmare number that you might expect. Instead, the film suggests that in 1962 Grace rescued the Principality from the depredations of Charles de Gaulle, who needed funds for the French military campaign in Algeria and (the film claims) put pressure on Prince Rainier to turn Monaco from a tax haven into a source of French income tax revenue. Rainier’s sister, Princess Antoinette, and her husband, Jean-Charles Rey, are in cahoots with the French government but another member of the royal household, although she stalks the corridors of the Grimaldi Palace like a Mrs Danvers impersonator, exposes their treachery. Grace then saves the day and Monaco’s sovereignty. This movie, with a screenplay by Arash Amel, seems designed to please no one. The potential audience for either a masochistic biographical weepie (which might have made up a bit for the letdown of Diana) or a nifty political suspense story is going to be disappointed, to say nothing of the Monegasque royal family, who’ve publicly rejected the film as a travesty.
There are some bewildering things in Grace of Monaco. The sub-Mrs Danvers is called Madge but Parker Posey speaks her lines in a French accent. When the tensions resulting from Grace’s possible return to Hollywood and Rainier’s political difficulties are putting a severe strain on their marriage, Grace decides to visit a ‘protocol expert’ (Derek Jacobi). Her education with him and his assistants includes French pronunciation but, even at the end of this, she can’t get ‘Rainier’ right (she usually calls him ‘Ray’ so perhaps the last syllable was never an issue before). In the first half of the film there are scenes of Rainier and his advisers (who include Onassis) having murky discussions in shadowy rooms while the women and children of the Monegasque elite talk and play outside in the sun. I suppose this means that, in one respect anyway, you can mention Grace of Monaco in the same breath as The Godfather. The significant looks quota, high throughout, goes through the roof at the climactic Monaco Red Cross Ball of October 1962, as Grace and her in-laws greet each other and a gimlet-eyed de Gaulle looks on (the traitorous pair have been rumbled but he doesn’t know that yet). An earlier moment when de Gaulle receives his invitation for the ball is very funny too. Maria Callas, who’s a pal of Grace’s, sings for the ball guests, who also include Robert McNamara, as President Kennedy’s representative. When Grace makes her speech and gets a standing ovation, McNamara pulls de Gaulle’s leg about rumours that he’d been thinking of dropping a bomb on Monaco. (If the date of this event – 9 October – is right, McNamara returned home to have the smile wiped off his face: the Cuban missiles crisis began a few days later.) It’s the Red Cross Ball that seals Grace’s triumph. De Gaulle backs off and Rainier is happy – his wife has also decided by now to turn Hitchcock down. In the closing moments of the film, Olivier Dahan puts sacred music on the soundtrack as if to suggest she’s not only a political heroine but a candidate for canonisation.
Nicole Kidman as Grace and Tim Roth as Rainier are both miscast: the intelligence that both bring to their parts inspires a mixture of admiration and sympathy for their hopeless plight. The slender Kidman isn’t physically similar to Grace Kelly, who had a broader face and radiated a healthy wholesomeness, although some clever photography by Eric Gautier turns Kidman’s features, in certain shots, into something close to the original. It’s the temperamental difference between the two, though, that defeats Kidman, for all that she’s a better actress than the woman whom she’s playing was. Grace Kelly may have been one of Hitchcock’s cool blondes but her beauty and persona were essentially unthreatening and innocent; Nicole Kidman has a tension and a self-awareness that get in the way. She delivers the climactic speech at the Red Cross Ball with a lot of skill but she doesn’t have the all-American ingenuousness which is surely what we’re meant to think carried the day. Tim Roth is an odd choice for Rainier, and his ratty moustache and anonymity suggest a shrewd, anxious businessman rather than a big fish in a small regal pond. He holds your interest, though. As well as Robert Lindsay, Posey Parker and Derek Jacobi, the cast includes Frank Langella (a priest), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (unhappily awkward as Hitchcock), Paz Vega (Callas), Geraldine Somerville (Princess Antoinette), Nicholas Farrell (Jean-Charles Rey – and as bad as usual), Milo Ventimiglia (Grace’s press secretary) and André Penvern (de Gaulle).
12 June 2014
