There is perhaps nothing like burlesque to discredit majesty. And yet, the monarchy inspired few French comedies. You have to go to Ernst Lubitsch to see the decadent court of Louis XV mocked (Madame du Barry, 1919) or tinted with derision the portrait of a queen with loose morals (Paradise defended, 1924).
Valérie Lemercier launches without complex, with Royal Palace!, in a satire of the life of palace. Drawing inspiration from biographies and diaries giving a favorable point of view on the daily life of the heirs to European thrones, she imagines a fictitious family that thumbs its nose behind the scenes at the hallowed formula according to which “all resemblance…”.
These gossip newspapers try to convince us that these people are like everyone else. Valérie Lemercier drives the point home, shows her BCBG Catholic heroes at the Gingerbread Fair, tug of war, on the blood donation bus… Except that she pushes the couple’s demonstration into the bedroom royal subject to the same trivialities as you and me, and injects, through a nod to the late Princess Diana, a serum intended to laugh at the way some manipulate the press to avenge the proprieties and pangs of protocol.
Nonconformist antics
Valérie Lemercier plays Armelle, a corny petty bourgeois speech therapist who married a rather dumb aristocrat – Lambert Wilson plays the retarded idler to perfection. Propelled into the role of potiche queen, after the death of her monarch stepfather, she accumulates blunders. When she learns that her husband is cheating on her and understands that she is despised by her mother-in-law, Eugénie (Catherine Deneuve), the tall, silly and even Machiavellian godiche, begins to seduce the media, plays the good girl, modest but charitable, and, adulated, makes himself indispensable to restore the image of a scratched royalty.
In tune with the heroines of Sacha Guitry, Valérie Lemercier – who signed, in 1997, a remake of the film by the filmmaker Quadrille (1938) –, pays the head of the new right after having mocked the left caviar in Le Derrière (1999). The circles of power, the family, the mirages of notoriety and the traps of appearances are the sources of inspiration for this comedian who has forged a “chic and provincial” character of Sainte-Nitouche, in order to amplify the impact of his unconventional antics.
An expert in facial expressions and gestures, there is something Jerry Lewis about this girl who is so comfortable playing the serving jug, but who cultivates the principle of duplication. In this comedy where, aesthetically speaking, it is not necessary to look for noon at 2 p.m., it is also the upheaval of comic decorum that it cultivates.