The Affair of the Necklace(2001)

Short pooper:
Marie-Antoinette (Joely Richardson) is guillotined, both for the widespread rejection she generated among the people and for her part in the whole affair. Many other prominent figures from the society and Church find themselves at trial, with variable results ranging from completely acquitted to imprisoned or banished from France. Jeanne (Hilary Swank) herself is sentenced to whipping and branding and goes into exile in London. In the end, she is shown as “having died after mysteriously falling from a hotel window”, with the suspicion that she was targeted for murder in retaliation for her hand in the machinations of the affair.

Longer version:
Jeanne dupes Cardinal de Rohan (Jonathan Pryce) into buying the necklace “on behalf of Queen Marie-Antoinette, to avoid public backlash,” using de Villette (Simon Baker) as a middleman; then, she fences the sale of some of its diamonds through de Lamotte (Adrien Brody) to finally buy her family home and completely stops the Cardinal’s “correspondence with the Queen.”

Jeanne, having fulfilled her lifelong wish, notifies the jewelers, “the Queen is no longer interested in the necklace, and they must go to the Cardinal for a reimbursement.” This sets up a chain of events that become the downfall of many: the jeweler Monsieur Bohmer (Paul Brooke) puts Minister Breteuil (Brian Cox) up to everything that has been happening; Breteuil denounces the Cardinal to King Louis (Simon Shackleton), who, in turn, draws the Cardinal to the Feast of the Assumption to have him arrested; after the Cardinal, everyone who had their hand in the necklace scam -with the exception of de Lamotte, who manages to escape to Austria- is also arrested and tried.

In the aftermath, Nicole Leguay d’Oliva (Hermione Gulliford), Count Cagliostro (Christopher Walken), and the Cardinal himself are cleared of all charges; however, de Villette is found guilty and banished from France, and Jeanne herself, is also found guilty, is publicly whipped and branded, and sent to prison, but she escapes and goes into self-exile in London. The scandal of the affair casts a shadow of irreparable damage to the Government and the Monarchy, and Marie-Antoinette herself, already heavily at odds with all of France for her lavish lifestyle at the expense of the widespread poverty the country suffered, is pinned as a culprit -even though she never cared for the necklace, in the first place-, arrested and sentenced to die by guillotine.

Jeanne, while living in London, writes a memoir and engraces herself with the locals. Nonetheless, a voiceover epilogue by Breteuil informs she never returned to France and met her demise after “mysteriously falling from the window of the hotel room where she lived”, although it is heavily implied a group of Royalists conspired to have her killed in revenge for her deception.