Vatel (Roland Joffé, 2000)

The ludicrous excesses of the court of Louis XIV, the sun King, continue to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination more than four centuries on, not least in cinema. It's not hard to see why: the mind-bogglingly lavish feasts and entertainments make for sumptuous eye candy on screen, and then there's the social comment angle ready-made too, with a claustrophobic circle of decadent toadies and back-stabbers, preening and conducting intrigues behind locked doors while the hoi polloi starve. Given all the ingredients for a complete package, all that a filmmaker has to do with them is avoid being seduced by the artifice themselves and fall prey to cliche.
The figure of François Vatel, the maître d’of the most prominent Bourbon prince, is a captivating one too. A perfectionist to a nigh-crippling degree, he was to commit suicide upon the failure of his ultimate royal banquet. Being the focal point of Joffé's English-language film, he gets to be played by an actual Frenchman amongst a host of English costume drama regulars, this rather predictably being Gérard Depardieu (Daniel Auteuil being the other default option). He does this as dependably as ever, despite being hindered with having the only non-RP accent in the house, portraying a commoner walking a tightrope between servile deference and barbed indignation. Depardieu is not the problem, and neither is the pageantry, which is spectacular. The rub lies in the other figures, from Tim Roth's carbon copy of his villain from Rob Roy, Uma Thurman uncertainly halfway between her character and Glenn Close's from Dangerous Liaisons, and a horde of tedious fops twittering sub-Ridicule bons mots. This is Vatel in a nutshell: it would be perfectly charming in large parts, were it not for the irritation caused by its constant derivativeness.

5/10