Farewell, My Queen, the new film from Benoît Jacquot, showing at Seven Gables in Seattle, is lush and atmospheric. Based on Chantal Thomas’s 2003 novel, it focuses on Marie Antoinette (played flawlessly by Diane Kruger) and her reader, Sidonie (a sultry and calculating Léa Seydoux), in the days immediately surrounding the build-up of the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille.

At times the camera seems to become Sidonie, bouncing up and down as she weaves through the anxious crowd in the back quarters of Versailles. It follows her as she lounges in the palace gondola; as she reads the latest fashion magazines to the queen; as she attempts to wake the Duchess Gabrielle de Polignac (played with a series of withering glances and intense gazes by Virginie Ledoyen), the queen’s lover, who–incidentally–sleeps completely in the nude.

Kruger and Seydoux play their parts with such gravitas that Sidonie’s blind devotion to the queen makes sense: it is clearly Sidonie’s raison d’être. And Kruger’s Marie Antoinette is a fragile and complex woman, sometimes frivolous, sometimes sensible; utterly distraught, slightly tyrannical, helpless, determined.

Sidonie’s loyalty to the queen and desire to be close to her is only intensified by the news of the Revolution and the circulating hitlist. In attempting to ingratiate herself, Sidonie takes on a secret embroidery project for the queen, tries to anticipate what mood the queen will be in and what she’ll want to hear, and makes the ultimate sacrifice: acquiescing to risking her life by trading identities with the Duchess during an attempt to flee from Versailles.