Grace of Monaco (2014)

The story of former Hollywood star Grace Kelly's crisis of marriage and identity, during a political dispute between Monaco's Prince Rainier III and France's Général Charles De Gaulle, and a looming French invasion of Monaco in the early 1960s.

The 67th Festival de Cannes opened with a royal fiction. It's traditional for Cannes to start with something spectacular. This film displays an homage to Princess Grace, formerly Grace Kelly. Nicole Kidman is magnificent and breathtaking in the part of this iconic figure of American Cinematography. In fact she embodied a sort of elegance through Hitchcock movies. In this film she's introduced mostly as a wife and a mother who wants to keep her career still. The director, Olivier Dahan (La Môme), had created this whole couple interactions. On the other hand Prince Rainier, starring Tim Roth, is a two faces character. With a complicated identity as he's dealing with his political and public image as well as his private family life. Plus, Grace's Royal life hasn't really turn out the way she imagined. yet for all the movie's efforts to turn this long forgotten Côte d'Azur missile crisis, it never registers as more than a turf war - whose worst possible outcome is that a few thousand tax- dodging bourgeois might be forced to become French citizen. The script is agonisingly airless, especially when it tries to fill into a conspirational plot involving Rainier's sister. Dahan keeps things very busy on the visual front even making sure to have a real fireworks erupting in the background of one marital argument. As Langella said once "At some point, every fairy tale must end" - only in the case of Grace of Monaco, not really soon enough.

Overall the resulting film is like a 104 minutes long Chanel ad editing with Instagram filters.