Jeanne du Barry (2023)

Jeanne du Barry is the kind of lavish period drama that doesn’t just recreate Versailles—it invites you to breathe its perfume and feel its chill, all while following a woman whose intelligence and hunger for freedom make her impossible to dismiss. Maïwenn frames Jeanne’s rise with a painter’s eye for tableaux and a storyteller’s instinct for human contradiction, letting the costumes and candlelit rooms dazzle without losing sight of the beating heart at the center. Johnny Depp’s Louis XV arrives less as a headline-grabbing novelty than as a weary monarch quietly startled back to life, and the film’s romance plays with a grown-up mix of tenderness, calculation, and consequence. It’s not for viewers who want a sanitized court fairy tale—there’s sensuality and ugliness alongside the beauty—but if you’re on the fence, this is a richly mounted, surprisingly intimate portrait of desire and power with real emotional bite.

Jeanne du Barry clearly wants to be a lush, old-school court romance about a woman clawing her way into Versailles and paying the price for it, and on a surface level it delivers the wigs, gilded rooms, and scandal. The problem is it often mistakes elegance for substance, skimming past the messier, more interesting contradictions in Jeanne’s life and leaving the character work feeling oddly hollow. Maïwenn has presence and there are moments of quiet intrigue, but the central relationship can feel more posed than passionate, which makes the big emotional beats land softly. If you’re here for sumptuous period atmosphere and a straightforward rise-and-fall biography, you’ll get your money’s worth; if you want sharp political bite, complex psychology, or truly crackling chemistry, this may test your patience.