Alan Rickman (2014)

Alan Rickman has directed only one previous feature film, The Winter Guest in 1997, which he co-wrote.  He appeared in that film in an uncredited cameo (‘Man in street’ on the IMDb cast list).  With Alison Deegan and Jeremy Brock, Rickman also has a screenplay credit for A Little Chaos, and he plays a much more sizeable role than he did first time out as a director.  With rather little experience behind the camera, he may have taken on too much here:  whatever the reason, A Little Chaos is an uncertain, inert piece of work.  Rickman plays Louis XIV of France and the film tells the story of how a landscape gardener called Sabine De Barra designed a fountain ‘feature’ as part of the park at the Palace of Versailles.  According to an interview with Screen Daily in September 2014, Rickman sees the film as

‘… not just frills at the wrists and collars. It’s about people getting their hands dirty and building something in order to entertain the other world they serve. It’s about how one world maintains the other, often at the cost of women.’

Sabine (Kate Winslet) is the protagonist of A Little Chaos; the other main character is Louis’s principal landscape architect and garden designer, André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts).  She is a fictional character; he is based on a real person.  Although the writing reeks of adaptation from a middlebrow historical novel, it appears that this is an original screenplay.  As such, it’s bafflingly inhibited.  The narrative is set up to stress the extraordinariness of a woman having an important creative role in the design of the Versailles gardens – yet, once the film is underway, Sabine’s gender counts for very little.  It’s barely mentioned, except in a scene at Fontainebleau in which Louis’s mistress Madame de Montespan (Jennifer Ehle) and other women attached to the court express surprise that Sabine has clean fingernails.

The script includes obvious horticultural similes:  human life – female beauty in particular – blooms then withers like a rose.  The film’s title reflects Sabine’s professional philosophy:  rigorous order in design must be leavened with freedom of invention.  The particular form of her contribution at Versailles is a puzzling choice, however, when Sabine herself is a made-up person and the writers weren’t therefore under pressure to be faithful to history.  Opting for fountains rather than flora limits Rickman’s scope for creating a rich gardening texture to the story and although the heroine encounters technical difficulties and there’s an attempt, in which Le Nôtre’s jealous wife (Helen McCrory) is the prime mover, to sabotage her work, there’s hardly any chaos in evidence – either in the process of construction or in the eventually successful outcome.  Fatally even-paced and with limited emotional rise and fall, A Little Chaos is one of those films that seem always to be on the point of starting.

Kate Winslet is conscientious and very skilful.  She holds the camera easily; there’s no strain or awkwardness in her bringing to life a woman of the seventeenth century.  Yet there’s an unusually uneasy quality about Winslet in this role; she evinces a sense of discomfort that seems to go beyond the unhappiness she’s meant to be feeling and expressing as Sabine.  Her performance is the joyless centre of a glum film.  As Le Nôtre, Matthias Schoenaerts does good things – there’s always plenty going on in his eyes and, in a sequence during which Le Nôtre sings, Schoenaerts’ voice, although not strong, is very pleasant.   When he’s speaking, however, he’s less effective here than he has been in other recent appearances.  Whereas Winslet makes the somewhat formal language sound natural, Schoenaerts is less comfortable – his voice is muffled and inexpressive.  Among Kate Winslet’s many virtues as a screen actor is her effortlessly clear diction; the same goes for Alan Rickman but some of his line readings are oddly slow, which tends to blunt his characteristic wit.  A scene in which Sabine first meets the king, in circumstances which cause her to mistake him for a gardener, is typical of A Little Chaos: it’s not bad but you feel it should be much more amusing than it turns out to be.

Stanley Tucci delivers another mildly enjoyable camp cameo, this time as the dandified bisexual Duc d’Orléans, and Steven Waddington does well as one of Sabine’s competitors for the design brief, who then becomes her right-hand man in constructing the fountain. As Mme Le Nôtre, Helen McCrory is, as usual, too deliberate – she comments on the character she’s playing instead of inhabiting it.  Jennifer Ehle, although looking increasingly like a sort of Meryl Streep tribute act, is more nuanced than usual.  Ehle expresses real hurt when, at Fontainebleau, Louis mocks Mme de Montespan’s advancing years.  Sabine boldly defends her to the king:  this is where the main comparison of human and botanical florescence occurs but the moment would be stronger if the rose in Kate Winslet’s hand were not an obviously artificial one.  In an earlier sequence in the Fontainebleau episode, each of the women gathered there takes her turn to summarise the children she has lost.  This is touching (Phyllida Law, as the eldest of the group, is particularly touching) – and the closest that Rickman gets to delivering on his avowed aim of illustrating the tough lot of women in the world that he’s describing.

When a film is as lacking in incident as this one, there’s always the risk that the few big dramatic moments will be melodramatic and the flashback that describes the death of Sabine’s child, and Sabine’s self-reproach for causing it, is abominably crude and overblown.  It really is an aberration in the context of A Little Chaos, which goes wrong much more as a result of excessive caution.  The atmosphere is becalmed because there is no psychological depth to compensate for the uneventfulness of the story, and Peter Gregson’s music, although it’s pleasing enough, has the effect of underlining that not much is happening.  Alan Rickman’s tentative, reserved direction starves the viewer.  I got impatient with Sabine and Le Nôtre’s signalling without acting on the attraction they feel for each other:  it’s a relief when they eventually go to bed together.  Rickman doesn’t always seem to have the camera at the right distance from the actors – especially in the celebratory finale at Versailles as Sabine’s garden is unveiled – and some of the lighting by Ellen Kuras is either inadvertently muddy or, more likely, the latest example of the current fashion to photograph a period piece using ‘natural light’.   As Sabine comes down the staircase on her arrival at Fontainebleau, she is told admiringly that ‘Everyone will be looking at you …’ – and you mutter under your breath, ‘But no one will be able to see you’.

21 April 2015