Rickman: A Little Chaos (2015)

Costume dramas tend to be an emphatically humanist genre, taking us back to eras where personality, subjectivity and experience were supposedly more centred, embodied and ordered than they are today. And, on the face of it, that’s exactly what Alan Rickman’s second film as a director is all about, a period drama revolving around the construction of the legendary garden at Versailles, with Rickman in the part of King Louis XIV, Matthias Schoenaerts as Andre Le Notre, a landscape gardener who firmly believes in the credo of order over nature, and Kate Winslet as Sabine de Barra, a landscape gardener who, as the title of the film suggests, believes in injecting a little chaos into the landscapes over which she presides. The stage is set for a drama of geometries, symmetries and vistas in the vein of Peter Greenaway, so it’s a little surprising when it turns out to be something of a riposte to Greenaway – and The Draughtsman’s Contract in particular – largely thanks to the way in which Rickman reserves the most romantic relationships for the landscape architects and their canvases, with the most sensual scenes reserved for their communion with plants. As a result, the film moves at a vegetative, vascular pace, generating a quite unique ambience and a hypnotic stillness, until it’s quiet enough that you start to sense all those other organisms and natural processes unfolding just below the threshold of audibility, sap flowing and buds opening, leaves decomposing and soil forming. Reinventing Versailles as thoroughly and audaciously as Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Rickman presents us with a world in which human consciousness is continually decentred, as his camera gravitates towards impossible and counter-intuitive vantage points, and humans themselves become progressively plant-like, sprawling, swaying and extending in strange dances, with little regard for the mores of gender, sexual orientation and class, which seem to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. That syncs perfectly with Rickman’s reserved, restrained diction, which is abstracted and rarefied here as never before, but it’s particularly impressive in Winslet’s hands as well – and, in their scenes together, they recall something of the vernal splendors of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, the same sense of a lush, vegetative vortex of a lifeworld continually expanding beyond any sightline that might contain it. Rococo artifice has become so inextricable from contemporary costume drama that it’s easy to forget how titillating, disorienting and sensually organic its tendrils were when they first emerged to grace gardens, furniture and paintings, but Rickman recovers that here, in one of the strangest and most alien costume dramas to grace our own stultified and stifled conventions for some time.