For more than two centuries, fans of Marie-Antoinette have wondered if she really had a romance with the Count of Fersen. Their secret correspondence exchanged during the Revolution, miraculously found, contains mysterious erasures that remain illegible to this day. Historians have always been convinced that they hid the key to the enigma. Today a scientific team (Conservation Research Center [CRC - CNRS / National Museum of Natural History and the curators of the National Archives) is preparing to scan these precious papers preserved at the National Archives. The queen's letters will finally reveal their secrets.
The film written by Évelyne Lever and directed by Daniel Ablin is a dive into the twists and turns of letters, into the intertwined atoms of ink that a transdisciplinary team will analyze in order to reveal their secrets.
If the advances of the researchers, the progressions, are the highlights of the film, the correspondence between Marie-Antoinette and the Count of Fersen is the milestone.
The further we progress in the documentary, the more palpable the tension becomes as the letters are revealed. The film strives to bring to life our two main characters: Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen.
Filming in laboratories, wandering through historic sites in France and Sweden, meetings with scientific experts and historians, the construction of the story attempts to convey the romantic tension against the backdrop of the French Revolution. A correspondence which is part of great History at a crucial period, that of the last year of the monarchy. A literally epistolary film in which Marie-Antoinette and Count de Fersen never cross paths.