A Little Chaos (2015)

Such a frustrating disappointment

From my favorite movies..

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

This is often passed over in silence but many workers died during those titanic (no pun intended) works:sometimes crushed under blocks ,they had to drain the swamps:a suicide because of the mosquitoes who transmitted marsh fever ,in other words,Paludism:men fell like flies.Saint-Simon talks about wagons of corpses ;they forced the workers into this living hell ,they had to live on the spot and were not allowed to see their wives and kids anymore ;some of them rebelled and threw blocks onto the foremen from the scaffolds ;the king called on the army.Many men were sentenced to death and hanged .Les Jardins Du Roy,it's a paradise (as depicted by the Sun King himself in the movie),but it's also that.Let's be lenient for the historical mistakes :Le Nôtre was 25 older than Louis XIV -and was not the vivacious handsome landscape gardener who woos Madame De Barra .He would not begin,in the kingdom of France , his letter with the word 'dear"!!Madame De Barra is pure fiction :one cannot imagine,at the time ,a female landscape architect -think that a hundred years later ,mathematician Sophie Germain had to take a male pseudonym to be able to continue her work on prime numbers- is thoroughly implausible ;it takes all Mrs Winslet's talent to make the character endearing.On the plus side ,in spite of an obvious lack of means (we are in the grandiose court of the Sun King,all the same!) ,there's an interesting depiction of the atmosphere of the courtiers;It's the first time I've seen a portrayal of Philippe D'Orleans ,Monsieur Frère Du Roi ,in accordance with historian Philippe Erlanger's book,which was not so in previous "Vatel" ,let alone the "Angélique Marquise Des Anges" saga : he is gay but his second wife ,La Princesse Palatine depicts him as " a brave man at war ,generous with the defeated ";actually they mutually agreed they would sleep apart,after she gave birth to heirs .A nice cinematography(superb finale) ,good acting by the whole cast ,let's forget history,and let's not deny ourselves a good moment.

I watched this through to the end in the hope that there would be an amazing ending or a twist. Anything to relieve the boredom from watching this drivel.Everything about it was awful. I did not believe any of the characters, I will overlook the Frenchman who spoke with a thick Northern English accent, but if this was an amateur play, maybe I could forgive it, but these are well known seasoned actors and no one seemed convincing at all.Kate Winslet was particularly dull, I am sure she was almost asleep in some scenes but the main problem was that nothing lifted the film from being so very dull.The sabotage scene was almost interesting, but even that was as wet as the garden project became.I cannot understand why anyone liked this dull, dreary, lifeless movie.

"Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man." - Henry Adams"A Little Chaos" stars Alan Rickman as Louis XIV, a French king who hires landscaper Andre Le Nortre to design a lavish garden. Andre recruits Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet) to assist him. A nonconformist, Sabine believes that gardens should reflect the "reality of nature", which she deems to be mutable, messy and largely untameable.Andre and Louis, of course, believe the opposite. They are traditionalists. They believe that France's Royal Gardens should be rigid, ordered, and emblematic of the monarch's permanence and power. In short, they believe that Man has the power to - and should - lord over all things (women, nature, whole populaces etc), whilst Sabine rejects such presumptions.After a chance meeting in a garden, Sabine brings Louis over to her way of thinking. She encourages him to reject royal customs, chase his passions and embrace death. This "woman's touch", the film suggests, would eventually lead to the French Revolution, in which the rigid arms of monarchy were challenged by disgruntled populaces. That the aristocracies of Europe only became more violent and controlling as they banded together to squelch revolutionaries, is a truth too pessimistic for this quirky little film."A Little Chaos" portrays King Louis as a kindly, elderly man who learns to relinquish control. The historical record paints him in a much more interesting light. Modern politics, accounting and accountability start with Louis, who tried to record and tabulate all transactions and expenditures which took place under his rule. Like contemporary superpowers, Louis was obsessed with micro-management and information gathering. Rather than heighten his power, though, this led to him realising just how much debt he had acquired, thanks largely to costly wars and expensive construction projects. Louis' hilarious response to impending bankruptcy was to throw away his accounting books and break up the central administration of his kingdom. With France's many accounts now impossible to unify, financial problems could then be ignored or shuffled about from ministry to ministry. In essence, Louis was cooking books and juggling junk bonds centuries before Wall Street. He had learnt that to really control populaces, you needed not old fashioned authoritarianism, but the messy, impenetrable gardens of Sabine.6/10 – Worth one viewing.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed watching this film. It was - well - nice. Still, I was disappointed. "A little chaos" has no point to me.First, I had thought it was based on a true story: a charming footnote in history worth being told. But no: The plot is entirely made up, the main character Sabine de Barra never existed and Versailles' famed garden architect André Le Nôtre was over 70 when he completed the surroundings of the castle. And Louis XIV was never ever such a subtle self-ironic personality as displayed by Rickman.So - what might be the point of the story? The "Win-against-all-odds" plot is highly predictable and really not much.The love story comes somewhat inevitable and - although nicely played by Winslet and Schoenaerts - does not really add to excitement; it has hardly any twists and turns.The gardening aspect could be interesting, but without in-depth knowledge of the history of garden architecture, we viewers are kept at loss to see why Mme de Barra's concepts might have been groundbreaking to gardening.For an breathtaking period drama the visuals are too modest and small.Personally, I would have liked to take this little episode as the exemplary and decisive turning point in the history of the ancien régime. Individual thinking and considerations of nature's law paving the way for 1789's revolution that overthrew the royals and their useless courtiers. The king's family, the nobles, their jaded ways are doomed long before they even know it.But we get far too little insight to allow such a far-reaching interpretation.What remains is a nice enough film for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but not more. And that is really a pity.