bogarde73 wrote on Oct 15
th, 2017 at 7:16am:
Another French movie I've been watching in instalments recently is called "The Queen's Reader".
Very good I thought and the lead actress extraordinarily sensitive.
It's set in the last days at Versailles for Marie Antoinette before she is forced off to imprisonment in Paris and eventual execution.
It conveys very well the atmosphere of the collapse of a system and the panic and despair of the people, especially the servants and courtiers, who depended.on it for their existence.
For some reason this movie came into my mind as I sit here with a glass of wine.
Among other things, I was thinking a lot of people probably would say these bastards - the court hangers-on, minor aristocracy etc - deserved everything that was coming to them.
But I take another view. These were like people anywhere, doing what they did, carrying out whatever mindless function, to make the best of life that was available to them.
The ideas were really only in embryo stage that the entire system their country operated on was corrupt, cruel, oppressive and the rest of it.
So watching the movie, if you ever get the chance, and it seems to have stuck with me, needs to be in the context of an understanding of all of that . . . .but I suppose you need to know the history reasonably well.