Lady Oscar ( Berusaiyu no bara (Japan) ) [DVD]

While this is not my favorite Démy film, it has many virtues. Strangely enough, its virtues are also its vices. For one thing, the strict visual adherence to the feeling and emotional scope of the comic book gives it an extraordinary flatness which is not suited so well to dramatic live-action narrative. The lead actress, Catriona MacColl, is so flat that she almost seems like a drawing, as does her pretty-boy long-term love. The extremely fetishistic gender and sexual issues would be better dealt with in a more adult way in a live action film, and yet doing so would take the film way outside of the scope of the comic book in an uncomfortable and perverse way. There was no attempt to make the lovely MacColl look like a boy when she is supposed to pass for one (she wears mascara, lipstick, and eyeshadow throughout, and her long blonde curled hair spills behind her in a loose ponytail), and yet she looks exactly like the starry-eyed heroine of the comic book. In a couple of scenes Démy alludes to her sexuality as a woman, as in one scene where a man looks in on her undressing and sees her topless, and in another where she rebukes the advances of a depraved nobleman by kissing a woman in public to the shock of the entire court, but the mix of the childlike and the adult is quite odd and I think would seem off-putting to many viewers. MacColl's flat performance is in contrast to Christine Böhm's rounder, more believable comic performance as Marie Antoinette, and yet her flatness also directly relates to her being raised as a boy, and being trained by her father not to display feminine emotions. ("I have trained my daughter not to cry!") So we have a character that is bound to behave unnaturally, as she is a total construction, a boy that is not a boy. The end result of all this is that we have this gorgeous confection of a movie, filmed partly at Versailles, with all of the depth of a pink frosted birthday cake. And yet we have weird psychological issues, like a father insisting on raising his daughter as a boy without considering the long-term effects, and then later fighting a duel with her. We have a person who is gender indeterminate at all times, and we never know who knows she is a woman and who thinks she is a man. We have gender identity constructed entirely through clothing and personal decisions, NOT through birth. And we have, in the background, a very light version of the French Revolution which is clearly caused by the feminine vanity and frivolity if the queen, who is seen constantly primping and dreaming about love and spectacle. The queen is not looked on in a particularly negative light; on the contrary, her frills and finery are totally enchanting, as this is a little girl's world. In this film, everything is treated with a light touch, as light indeed as a comic book, so that there is a surface of pleasant aestheticism in the peasants, the court, and every frame which looks like a perfect picture. There is a particularly unsatisfying storming of the Versailles, almost as if it was specifically geared towards the emotional pitch of little girls playing dress-up at a tea party, but all was done to preserve that flatness and lightness of a book of drawings made for girls. So actually this film is quite interesting, as it continues in Démy's habit of bringing perverse fairy tales to life in his own unique way. Démy was way ahead of his time, in going into issues of gender construction through clothing. The choices he made in the film were suitably peculiar, but above all they highlight these issues of a girl's fantasy life and her reluctance to grow up and have to take on an inferior or less fun role as a woman.

You wanna watch a real version of 'The Rose of Versaille', I highly recommend the animated version instead. I'm just so glad that this film was uploaded on YouTube, both in English and Spanish. The story depicts semi-factual events about the French Revolution, but not as accurately as the animated film version of this story.

Save your bucks on this one and log into YouTube. You won't regret it.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see both reviews  2.5 out of 5 stars