Robin Renucci

Johnny Depp stars as King Louis XV in the story of the entrancing Jeanne du Barry (Maïwenn), a French peasant woman whose meteoric rise through the royal court to become the King's last mistress creates a scandal of epic proportions. Based on a true story.

In the middle of the 17th century, the Marquise de Sévigné wanted to make her daughter a brilliant and independent woman in her own image. But the more she tries to control the young woman's destiny, the more she alienates her. Mother and daughter then experience the throes of a singular and devastating passion. A major work of French literature is born from this devastation.

The memoirs of Brantôme, published in 1740, certainly gave an admirable picture of the general court-life of the time, with its unblushing and undisguised profligacy. There is not an homme illustre or a dame galante in all his gallery of portraits who hasn't engaged in what Medieval Christian prescriptions as well as the Victorian society would regard as sexual immorality; and yet the whole is narrated with the most complete unconsciousness that there is anything objectionable in their conduct.

Maria Linde is a free-spirited, Jewish Polish Nobel Prize winner. After a terrorist attack in Rome, Maria refuses to succumb to the hysterical fear and anti-immigrant sentiment that quickly emerge, deciding in her acceptance speech of a local honour to boldly decry Europe's eroding democracy, but she is unprepared for the personal havoc her comments wreak.