A Little Chaos
A romantic drama following Sabine (Academy Award winner Kate Winslet), a strong-willed and talented landscape designer, who is chosen to build one of the main gardens at King Louis XIV’s new palace at Versailles. In her new position of power, she challenges gender and class barriers while also becoming professionally and romantically entangled with the court’s renowned landscape artist André Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts).
Kate Winslet blooms in a film full of heaving bosoms, flouncing dandies and landscape gardening.
Alan Rickman directed this – it’s his second behind-the-camera effort, after the Emma Thompson-Phyllida Law Scottish coastal drama The Winter Guest, way back in 1997. It’s an indulgently actorly piece, but in a thoroughly pleasant way.
Rickman also co-stars as a very droll Louis XIV, who likes to take a turn through the palace grounds and throw off his wig after a long morning’s kinging. So it is that Sabine mistakes him for a horticulturalist she’s due to meet, and they spend an afternoon together talking about roses and forbidden love and whatnot. It’s a jolly sequence, well-played by both stars, but the first half of it does wholly consist of Rickman repeating Winslet’s lines back to her with a puzzled question-mark attached. “My book on pears?”
Matthias Schoenaerts neuters his sex-god reputation, Kate Winslet gets maverick with potted plants, and Alan Rickman almost hijacks his own movie in a weedy horticultural romp through the court of the Sun King.
