Daily Blague

I've no way of knowing how many North American Pompadourians tuned in to the second and final episode of Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour on TV5 this evening, but I hope that we'll all connect. It was a preposterous soap opera, not because it was wildly unfaithful to the facts - it wasn't, not wildly - but because it would have bored the Marquise to death. All that royal family contumely! Who knew that the dauphin (Damien Jouillerot, in a supremely unendearing performance) was such a pain in the ass? Until this show was made, he was simply a cipher who predeceased his father, making way for Louis XVI. Now he's someone to detest! In Jeanne Poisson, art and politics take second fiddle to tirades out of The Queen.

Hélène de Fougerolles turns out to be a magnificent Pompadour. You don't think so at first; she's much too easygoing and, in the American sense of the word, fresh. But she ages into the part, so to speak. She does her best with impossible lines and ridiculous, silent-movie situations. She manages to honor the woman she's reincarnating while playing to a gallery of people who have no idea of Pompadour's singularity. The best joke comes at the end, when the credits name the lady's surviving mansions. Dont, as the French say - in their abominable conceit considering it a complete sentence - the official residence of the French Président, Le palais d'Élysée. Imagine old Bushois, dying to get out of a house rebuilt by a woman. I mean young Bushois.

When I say that Charlotte de Turckheim is also fantastic, as Marie Leszczyńska - Louis XV's queen - it's quite as though, what with all these aristocratic names, the very court had come back to life to impersonate itself. Happily, there is Vincent Perez as Louis XV. M Perez is quite above the aristocracy - and abysses below it. I have never seen royalty played with such conviction. An extraordinarily handsome man (as Louis XV certainly was) puts more faith in his God than in his looks - now, that's sincerity! I don't know how M Perez kept a straight face, but perhaps it was remuneration in ducats.

The only thing wrong with Jeanne Poisson is that Joan Crawford isn't in it. Well, she is in it, somewhere, motivating the actors to do their best with ridiculous material. The show a raté les Énarques - precious few genuine locations were made available for filming. Les BCBG decided that the project was beneath them. It was - and their disapproval matters. Jeanne Poisson gives us a Pompadour whose primary legacy was the screwing up of a happy family, and the humiliation of a king who let himself be advised by a woman. I suppose it's not insignificant that TV5 is operated by Le Figaro. They'll let Catherine Deneuve sing the praises of France's second greatest arts patron (Pompadour would have been the first to hail Louis XIV). But when they address her life, she's just a powdered pute.

Which is wrong.