Never let a man direct a women's film

A girl brought up as a boy and finally became the commander of the Royal Guard. For a story like that, it's not too much to expect the film to be something like Mulan at least, isn't it? I'm not even asking for Utena. Little did I know that this is actually a campy farce.

Lady Oscar was one of the films featured in the Jacques Demy retrospective organised by Broadway Cinematheque & the French Consulate. I have to admit I knew nothing about this director before I went into the cinema. I was just intrigued by a French (albeit Japanese funded) adaptation of the groundbreaking manga The Rose of Versailles which, as the title indicates, is set in France. 

Now for those of us who are of a certain age, or who are reasonably familiar with the history/theories about boys love (BL) manga, an adaptation of The Rose of Versailles is just too tempting to resist as this epic manga is almost universally cited as the precursor to the development of BL.

I don't know what the others at the cinema expected from this film - I did notice quite a number of women - but one thing's for sure, we didn't expect it to be English. The whole audience burst into excited murmuring when the first character spoke, because the subtitles were in French and the dialogues were in English. I'd never studied the opening credits so diligently and I was shocked to see that this is an essentially English production with Japanese money. Only the art departments were French. So what did we end up with? A merchant ivory film with exaggerated acting more suited for the theatre or "art" films and comical action scenes that belong with silent movies. And of course the obligatory naked breasts for French films.

Nothing says better about the directing than the fact that Marie Antoinette seemed the most sympathetic character to come out of the film. She may be a naive pampered girl but at least we see that she knows what she wants and we see how good she is at getting it. In contrast, the film didn't show Oscar just looks like a naive pampered girl who doesn't deserve her rank at all because the film did not show how hard she worked and how competent she actually was. We only see her unable to mount a horse without an assistant lifting her. Several times in the film.