Sometimes a pleasant, gentle and very watchable film is just what the doctor ordered. A Little Chaos is, unapologetically, such a film. It follows the fictional Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet) as she pursues a position working for hugely prominent landscape architect, André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts), creating new gardens at Versailles in 1682. Her first and only interview for the post goes badly, with her artistic hero quickly dismissing both her approach to ‘order’ and her apparent appetite for ‘chaos.’ Predictably however, this dashing male figure appears at de Barra’s home and (rather inexplicably) states that he wishes to employ her all the same. Dramatic tension out of the way, from here the film meanders inoffensively towards its inevitable conclusion.

Though Kate Winslet delivers a more than acceptable performance the chemistry between her and love interest Schoenaerts is lacking. Helen McCrory stars as le Nôtre’s vindictive and unfaithful wife who (despite her own dalliances with other men) cannot bear to see her husband have his head turned by an unassuming and highly talented gardener. She is responsible for the near-destruction of de Barra’s ambitious garden, ordering a sluice gate be lifted as the heavens open and a veritable monsoon falls over France. Nevertheless, the viewer never doubts that her labour of love will survive. The one moment where something resembling sexual chemistry emerges occurs when a drenched le Nôtre pulls an equally sodden Sabine from the water. After she rushes to close the sluice gate they gaze longingly at one another whilst still clinging to the banks of the water channel.

Lurking in the background of de Barra’s occasionally disrupted gardening efforts is her trauma at having lost her husband and daughter when their carriage swerved off the highway and overturned, before she pursued her job at Versailles. Winslet’s distress is convincing, but it is a shame that the film’s audience discovers the source of her pain in a series of unsubtle and overdone flashbacks. Towards the end of the film we are treated to one of its slightly less predictable turns in the revelation that de Barra’s husband had been engaged in an adulterous relationship. Though she is heartbroken at this discovery, in dramatic terms the infidelity of her late first husband enables Sabine to enjoy her new lover free of guilt, and along with the eventual realisation of her gardening dream, provides the film with a suitably happy ending.

The production manages not to be over-dominated by jealous wives or de Barra’s grief, however, and a noteworthy comedic scene exists when de Barra encounters Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) and mistakes him for another horticulturist. It does not take long for him to give himself away but, alone after the death of his Queen, he insists they keep up the pretence for the rest of the day, confessing that he would actually quite like to hear all about perennials and other similar botanic matters.

Yet, even when this production is worthy of a chuckle or two it is still highly frustrating in terms of dialogue. If you like your seventeenth-century characters to speak with any accuracy whatsoever regarding the era, this film is not for you. De Barra’s head gardener insists, for instance, that she needs to be more authoritative and become ‘the boss man’. It was at this point in the film that I finally gave up hope that the piece would attempt to conjure up any sense of the period, from a linguistic point of view. In addition to the depressingly bad dialogue we have to endure some very abrupt changes of scene which appear at odds with the overall gentle feel of the film. As director, Rickman gives you a safe plot, a good cast, beautiful costumes and attractive landscapes; a smoother progression would be far more fitting.

A Little Chaos explores what was a conflict of the time in landscape design—simplistically put, order vs chaos—but it fails to go into much detail. The viewer learns little of seventeenth-century gardening. There are also glaring historical inaccuracies, such as the fact that le Nôtre was significantly older in 1682 than this film leads us to believe. Though it remains reasonably entertaining, if you are wanting more than pleasant mediocrity, you would be advised to look elsewhere.

A Little Chaos was released at cinemas in the UK on April 17th 2015 and is now available on DVD.