A few explanatory lines - sadly missing from the script - are necessary because only the historically-minded (with some background in French history) will truly understand the theme.
Which is that all the primary characters are trapped.
Le Notre is trapped in a job he doesn't really enjoy.
Madame Le Barre trapped in guilt for an accident she believes she caused.
Louis XIV trapped in the vast expectations of his role as God King.
And most notably: nobles trapped at an elaborate and idle court.
This is where some knowledge of history is useful - understanding that Louis XIV understood that the only real danger to his dynasty was over-powerful nobles.
The king didn't want his aristocrats plotting against him, so he brought them to court: where they could be watched constantly and they would exhaust their incomes in expensive clothes and gambling.
If you don't understand Louis XIV's paranoia about his peers you can't understand what the courtier means when he tells Madame De Barre that the nobles are "trapped like mice".
On a Marxist note: money for formal gardens didn't grow on trees back then either, so every facet of Versailles was built on the sweat and blood of nameless peasants who funded the gardens but would never be permitted to see the gardens. The aristocrats walking through the greenery were free of taxes on the other hand - true parasites whose descendants roughly 150 years later were taken to the scaffold to have their heads struck off. One of history's great corrections.
Aside from all of the above, the film has some very effective moments as it walks along its ultra-predictable path. Although the sturdy Kate Winslet who appears here cannot be mistaken for the much more petite Kate Winslet from "Titanic".
On a Marxist note: money for formal gardens didn't grow on trees back then either, so every facet of Versailles was built on the sweat and blood of nameless peasants who funded the gardens but would never be permitted to see the gardens. The aristocrats walking through the greenery were free of taxes on the other hand - true parasites whose descendants roughly 150 years later were taken to the scaffold to have their heads struck off. One of history's great corrections.
Aside from all of the above, the film has some very effective moments as it walks along its ultra-predictable path. Although the sturdy Kate Winslet who appears here cannot be mistaken for the much more petite Kate Winslet from "Titanic".