Review: Lady J

The Netflix keywords attached to Emmanuel Mouret’s 2018 film Lady J are how I would like to be described in my obituary: ‘Cerebral, Witty, Romantic’. My own personal verdict on the film is how I will probably be described in my obituary: ‘Disappointing’.

The movie plot is loosely adapted from a story told in Denis Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796). Madame de la Pommeraye (Cécile de France) is a wealthy and enigmatic widow seduced by the advances of the Marquis de Arcis (Edouard Baer), a prolific womaniser. Two years into their romance, Pommeraye, sensing that the marquis’s passionate hunger for her has fallen into decline, tricks Arcis into admitting as much by pretending she feels the same way. The two agree to remain close friends; the marquis vocal in his relief, Madame silent in her heartbreak. Incensed by the marquis’s treatment of her, Pommeraye hatches a plan to humiliate her former lover, enlisting the services of two prostitutes—mother and daughter Madame de Joncquières (Natalia Dontcheva) and the titular Mademoiselle de Joncquières (Alice Isaaz). Presenting the two women as devout churchgoers left destitute by a gambling husband and father, Pommeraye manipulates the marquis into marrying the beautiful young mademoiselle. She later reveals the newly-minted marquise to be not the vestal virgin she had appeared, but a former harlot. ‘You acquired an honest woman whom you could not keep,’ Pommeraye tells him. ‘That woman was me. Out of charity, I made you marry one worthy of you.’

The film is a stylishly shot and lusciously costumed affair that desperately wants to be Dangerous Liaisons. Despite its best efforts, the Marquis de Arcis is a cardboard character whom the audience is never quite driven to either champion or despise. He lacks the charisma and self-awareness of a literary libertine like the Vicomte de Valmont, easily duped by Pommeraye and stumbling pathetically around after Mademoiselle de Joncquières, lauding her perceived virtue and chastity. To the film’s credit, Madame de la Pommeraye’s subtle manipulation and smiling cruelty, reminiscent of Laclos’s Marquise de Merteuil, certainly make for compelling viewing in places. ‘If other women in my situation had enough self-esteem, they’d do the same,’ she declares to the marquis, ‘and men like you would be less common.’ It is abundantly clear, however, that Pommeraye is less concerned with wider systemic sexual double standards than personal vendetta, since she has no sympathy for the ruined Madame de Joncquières beyond her daughter’s usefulness to the revenge plot. The flawed feminism of Pommeraye’s crusade is highlighted with some well executed nuance; scenes of her exploiting and humiliating the marginalised Joncquières women are suitably uncomfortable, and the rewards she reaps for her scheming are ultimately short-lived and superficial. Mademoiselle de Joncquières (now the Marquise de Arcis), wracked with guilt throughout the deception, throws herself on the marquis’s mercy and begs to be allowed to prove herself an honourable wife to him, an offer he gladly accepts. 

One crucial shortcoming of Lady J is that its titular heroine inspires at best, indifference and at worst, distaste. Mouret’s characterisation of Mademoiselle de Joncquières seems to assume that the audience is one of eighteenth-century moralists who need no other inducement to root for her than that she is beautiful and pure of heart. ‘She has nothing of the libertine,’ her mother insists, while the marquis observes: ‘She has the face of one of Raphael’s Madonnas.’ Scholars such as Mary Peace, Laura J. Rosenthal, and Katherine Binhammer have written extensively on the subject of the sentimental prostitute in eighteenth-century literature, and when we consider Lady J through this lens, Mademoiselle de Joncquières is the quintessential penitent magdalen. The sentimental whore, notes Binhammer, ‘beckoned public sympathy, but could only do so if she could be understood as an unwilling agent in sexual commerce.’ Mademoiselle de Joncquières is a passive pawn for three-quarters of the film and when she speaks it is to lament that she has deceived the marquis into marrying her, crying, ‘What dignity in pretending to love?’ Rather than properly deconstruct the marquis’s fetishization of female purity, Lady J co-opts an eighteenth-century-style hierarchy of what it means to be a ‘ruined’ woman, ostensibly concluding that Mademoiselle de Joncquières is one of the deserving poor who merits better than her lot in life; because, regardless of her inherited circumstances, she is intrinsically honest and god-fearing (and also, of course, young and extremely pretty).

Lady J is therefore, arguably, faithful to the literary conventions of its eighteenth-century setting. Yet when we consider it alongside close contemporaries like Harlots (2017-19) or Black Sails (2014-17) which depict female sexuality, sex work, and economic vulnerability with more nuance, Lady J seems like a wildly archaic moral fable in comparison. Revenge may indeed be best served cold; Lady J is a room-temperature house wine with a questionable aftertaste.

Cover photo by Teah Rushing on Unsplash