Following hot on the heels of Lost River, Ryan Gosling's unsatisfactory directorial debut, the perennially likeable Alan Rickman steps up to the plate for this frocked misfire.
Taking inspiration from the historical personage of André Le Nôtre – the principal gardener of King Louis XIV and the brains behind the gardens at Versailles – A Little Chaos casts the always welcome Matthias Schoenaerts as the influential landscaper.
He’s joined by Kate Winslet as a widowed gardener tasked with designing a fountain. There is sexual tension. Or rather, we’re told there is. Winslet and Schoenaerts are capable actors, but they generate surprisingly little heat.
That may be down to the muddled construction of a film that can’t decide if it’s a love story, a portrait of grief, a comedy of manners, or if it’s just happy doing chocolate-box historical postcards.
There are some plot points: During one scene, Louis XIV (Rickman) pretends to be a gardener. During another, there are attempts to sabotage the fountain project. But these incidents fail to coalesce into anything too entertaining. Fun footnotes are provided by Rickman’s monarch and Stanley Tucci’s bisexual-and-lovin’-it Duke Philippe d’Orleans. That’s the movie we wanted to see.
Instead we get a heavily signposted tragedy in flashback and a CG garden that’s almost as inauthentic as everything else.
