Review: The Rose of Versailles is (appropriately?) beautiful and thorny

We have yet another addition to the list of movies where lesbianism probably could've solved a lot of the characters' problems. That list is likely a lot longer than any of us can even imagine.

There's a beautiful story in The Rose of Versailles, one that is unfortunately a bit hard to find in an enjoyable but pretty frustrating film. Adapted from the classic manga, which was adapted more than 30 years ago into an anime series, you can feel a tension in this movie that it just isn't really meant to be a movie. Or at least not this movie. The original series ran for 40 episodes. That's a lot of content to try to cram into less than 2 hours. And for most of its runtime, The Rose of Versailles almost doesn't even feel like a movie. Rather, it feels like a bunch of scenes happening in a row, sometimes feeling connected to each other, often not, with the occasional music video dropped in for good measure.

You'd be forgiven for feeling a bit whiplashed by the whole thing. There were a few different times where it felt like a true blink-and-you-miss-it moment, only you didn't miss anything from blinking. It's just how the movie is structured, how it moves from moment to moment. There's barely any time for these characters to breathe, so they end up feeling like puppets being forcibly put through the dramatic motions of palace intrigue, forbidden romance, sweeping historical change. Maybe it should've been adapted as a series again, or at least a limited series. Maybe the scope of the story should've been honed and focused. I don't know. But I do know that, despite these frustrations, I did enjoy watching this iteration of the story (which, also, is my introduction to it).

The Rose of Versailles begins with Marie Antoinette's arrival in Paris. The Austrian archduchess is to wed the French dauphin, creating a stronger alliance between the two countries, and also poising her to someday be France's queen. As she rides through the city in her carriage, a dashing soldier catches her eye: Oscar, a woman who was raised by her father as if she were a son, and whose purpose in life is to serve as Marie Antoinette's Royal Guard.

The romantic tension between the two is, to my gay little eyes, extremely thick. I truly wondered if I was about to watch some lesbian romance unfold. Sadly, that is not the case, and the general gender fuckery of Oscar's existence doesn't manifest in any ways that are terribly exciting. But at least for those few beautiful moments, I thought it might be something sapphic. Alas.

Once the story gets going, it really gets going. And I use the term "story" a little loosely because, like I said, the way this thing moves is really odd. One second Marie is sneaking out of the palace. Then she's at a masquerade ball (presumably where she snuck out to?) where she meets a handsome Swedish count. Then the count is at the palace. Now she's on a runaway horse! It feels like we're speed-running to story, which doesn't give us much time to really fall in love with most of the characters, or even get to know them very well. It feels like very few scenes, we're skipping a year or two or three ahead, given some historical context via voice-over narration, and then we're off to the races again.

A lot of the characters' interiority comes out in musical numbers, which aren't really sung-and-danced, but are rather more like music videos where we watch the characters walking around, looking glum, holding roses, crying, etc. Some of these are very forward in what they're trying to convey. My favorite, "Ma Vie en Rose," establishes that Marie Antoinette feels isolated and lonely in her new life, despite all the luxury around her. Others are a little harder to parse, partially because the tangled web of romantic interests isn't always terribly legible. By the end, we know who wants who, but it occasionally felt like the lines of desire were being left a little too vague.

The real meat, narratively, is Oscar's character, and her transformation from dutiful Royal Guard to someone who empathizes with the increasingly dire plight of the French citizenry. She tries to keep Marie Antoinette's extravagance in check as much as she can, but that's not really her place, and ultimately, she moves further and further away from the monarch, and becomes more radicalized. This is where the movie really finds its footing, and I guess I ended up wishing that the whole thing was more focused on that rather than including some of the other plots and subplots that feel more like window dressing, certainly less thematically compelling. Oscar's change of heart, along with her late-blooming romantic subplot, make the movie end more strongly than it begins, which is nice, I suppose, because it helped leave me with a general feeling of goodwill toward the enterprise as a whole.

André is so hot

Especially when taken in concert with the animation, which has a lovely old-school feel to it. Gorgeous, opulent settings, so much detail in every room and costume. The huge sparkly eyes, Marie's almost too big for her face. While the songs didn't leave the biggest impression on me, I'm always game for a musical, and some of the musical sequences feature really stunning, more impressionistic artistic flourishes that I really appreciated.

I can't imagine this is the best way to experience this story, but it's at least the least time-intensive, and it does enough well to make it worth a watch if it at all tickles your fancy.