The King’s Daughter: Louis XIV’s Daughter Mind-Melds with A Mermaid
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
A lavish, deeply silly movie targeted at the adolescent girl market, The King’s Daughter features Pierce Brosnan as The Sun King, Louis XIV, looking like an aging glam rock star, traipsing about the Palace of Versailles in a wavy wig and pouffy sleeves.
If that’s not enough, there’s also William Hurt as a bearded Jesuit, swallowing a gravelly British stage accent, a sugary voice-over narration by Julie Andrews, enough costume changes for a season of Emily in Paris, and perhaps best of all, a virtual tour of that inhabited work of art, The Palace of Versailles. Against all rational odds, I rather enjoyed it.
Perhaps it’s a case of sympathy for the underdog. The film has an absurdly tortuous history. The source material, Vonda N. McIntyre’s young adult novel, The Moon and the Sun — an historical fantasy in which King Louis XIV of France captures a mermaid — beat out George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones for the Nebula Award in 1997. An adaptation was in the works as long ago as 1999.
A couple of years later, Natalie Portman attached, before the project sank beneath the surface again. The current film, financed with Chinese studio money and directed by Sean McNamara (known for pre-teen television shows such as That’s So Raven and The Secret World of Alex Mack), wrapped production back in 2014.
Three weeks before the April 2015 release, the studio Paramount pulled the plug, reportedly dissatisfied with its poor special effects. And now, it has raised its ahead above the surface again under a different distributor, like a misplaced letter from the last decade.
The story, set in the 1690s, follows the king’s (fictional) illegitimate daughter, feisty equestrian, swimmer, and cellist Marie-Josèphe (the pale and willowy British actress Kaya Scodelario) who has been raised in a convent, where she specialized in annoying the nuns.
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One day she is unexpectedly summoned to Versailles, ostensibly as court composer and cellist in the musical ensemble that wakes the king up each morning.
While surreptitiously reconnecting to his offspring, the Sun King is seeking immortality in less conventional ways, when his nasty court physician (Pablo Schreiber) hatches a plan to capture a mermaid, dissect it during the next eclipse, and — I think I have this part right — cut out its heart and feed it to the king, thereby making him immortal.
(I couldn’t help but be reminded of the late Nipsey Russell’s poem: “They just made a movie about a mermaid/I don't understand the reason why/Not enough woman to make love to/And too much fish to fry.”)
The unfortunate mermaid (theoretically played by Chinese star Fan Bingbing, but impossible to distinguish from an animated creation through the smeary layers of CGI effects) is imprisoned in a pool at the Palace. There, she makes mournful whale noises, only intelligible to the musically sensitive Marie-Josèphe. A romantic subplot involves the heroine’s attempts to thwart her father’s plans to wed to an effete merchant’s son rather than the lusty ship’s captain and mermaid minder (Benjamin Walker) whom she prefers.
Much of this is tedious though, in sections, possibly well-suited to middle-school girl parties. Surprisingly, the dialogue flares into exchanges that are actually witty. James Schamus, the estimable writer/producer best known for his work with Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk) is co-credited with the screenplay from an earlier incarnation of the film.
“Where am I going?” asks Marie-Josèphe when the king’s emissary is sent to pluck her from the convent. “To a lavish and glimmering hell where you will no doubt thrive,” responds the frosty mother superior.
When Marie-Josèphe tells her lady-in-waiting that the trapped mermaid has summoned her in the night, the servant responds incredulously: “A beautiful hairy fish called you from your chamber?”
For my money, the highlight comes when Brosnan’s King Louis, over dinner, settles an incipient duel. He waves to the servers and attendant orchestra and says, “Serve the sixth course. Play on!”
The King’s Daughter. Directed by Sean McNamara. Written by Barry Berman and James Schamus, based on the novel, The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre. Starring Pierce Brosnan, William Hurt, Kaya Scodelario, Benjamin Walker, and Fan Bingbing. For local ticket information, click here.