NYICFF Review: My Life in Versailles is a charming collection of tiny tales
My Life in Versailles started as a short film back in 2019, about a young girl who goes to live with her uncle, a former dancer who is now a custodian/groundskeeper at the historical French palace. That short became a 6-episode TV series, which has now been adapted into a supremely charming feature adaptation which held its US premiere yesterday at the New York International Children's Film Festival. That you can feel its origins is, for me, one of the film's strengths. My Life in Versailles moves along at such a breezy clip as it moves from episode to episode. You can pretty much feel where one ends and the next begins. Now it's the Christmas episode. Now it's the school play episode. And so on and so forth. The film is a collection of little plots, each one cute and sweet and with good lessons to learn. Taken together, they form a nice narrative framework for the more compelling character arc Violette goes through. Violette becomes a ward of the state, and then moves ...
