The illegitimate daughter of, based on this model of occasions not less than, a prepare dinner and a monk, Jeanne (performed by Maïwenn as an grownup, and by mannequin Loli Bahia as an adolescent) quickly learns to monetise her God-given items, turning into the toast of 18th-century Parisian society as a celebrated courtesan. However the courtroom of Louis XV (Johnny Depp, bewigged and showing considerably befuddled to search out himself in a French-language costume drama) is much less receptive to her particular talent set, and Jeanne is confronted with open hostility when the king selects her to be his maîtresse-en-titre, or chief mistress.
Fuelled by sexual misadventures, grand scandals and gossip, feuds and aristocratic treachery, on the very least this image, which Maïwenn directs in addition to stars in, needs to be a robustly disreputable romp. But it surely’s a curiously inert affair: constrained, corseted, passionless and saddled with a lumpen, Depp-shaped deadweight the place there needs to be a pulse-racing core of energy and need.
