A LITTLE CHAOS 2.5/5
There’s two kinds of people on the planet. There’s your well-ordered ones who like a well-ordered world, all straight lines and neat boxes. They poo-poo creative clutter. They want everything to be just so and just right. The others are all higgledy-piggledy, order-in-chaos, finding beauty in the askance and askew. Both find the other immensely irritating – and, of course, immensely intriguing.
How do you make sense of the world when all you see is bedlam? How do you rejoice in life when all you see are rules? This is the dichotomy presented to us in A Little Chaos – the pandemonium of nature versus the perfection of design.
The film tells the story of Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), a landscape gardener in seventeenth-century France. When King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) decides to build his palace at Versailles, he hires the famed gardener and landscape architect André Le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to create the estate around the new palace. Le Nôtre in turn hires de Barra to build a fountain in the garden. Le Nôtre (who, incidentaly, was a real person – he actually did design and build the gardens at Versailles) is your well-ordered type who knows just what the king wants: order out of chaos brings beauty. De Barra is the creative one, who recognises that there is just as much beauty and order in the chaos as out of it. When Le Nôtre and Barra work together, there’s chaos, and order, and beauty, and conflict, love, and lessons learned.
A Little Chaos is a fine enough film, but it was hard to find the real beauty hiding in all the disorder. Winslet seems unconvincing in her role (never mind the implausibility of a woman being a landscape gardener at Versailles in the 1600s), and Rickman’s portrayal of the Sun King is a bit too over-egged – he places too much emphasis on the stuffiness and frou-frou, and not enough on the humanity and dreams of the man. The plot is quite predictable (of course de Barra and Le Nôtre fall in love, because opposites attract and all that, and of course there’s rivals, and of course there’s skulduggery), and it’s also rather too drawn out – in parts, it felt as if we were watching the lengthy building of the gardens happen in real time. Indeed, the whole film feels bloated and clumsy.
This is only Rickman’s second go behind the cameras (he last directed a film about twenty years ago), and it’s not hard to see why he’s more well-known as an actor than a director. There are some wonderful moments (Stanley Tucci is outstanding as the very gay Duc d’Orleans), and there’s some lovely cinematography (especially at the beginning), but on the whole there simply isn’t enough beauty in the chaos for this film to really work.
Michael Tarry
6th March 2015
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