Grace Kelly biopic fails to come to life

You could make numerous movies about the life of Grace Kelly. Perhaps on her Philadelphia upbringing, with an ex-bricklayer father who won three Olympic gold medals for rowing, who later told her that he felt her career-choice of acting was "a slim cut above streetwalking". Or her spell at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Art, working as a model to support herself, before launching on Broadway. And then there's Hollywood: 11 feature films in five years that turned her into a superstar.

Of course, no Kelly film would be complete without her fairy-tale ride from an Academy Award-winning actress (for her beleaguered wife in 1954's ) to Princess Grace. Kelly first met Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1955, when she was attending the Cannes Film Festival. Within a year, she and the prince were married in what was dubbed "the wedding of the century" - the sort of lavish ceremony that made even the recent nuptials of George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin look frugal by comparison.

Yet little of this is in Olivier Dahan's , a film that stirred up controversy and catcalls in equal measure when it opened this year's Cannes Film Festival. Starring Nicole Kidman as Kelly, it begins as she walks off the set of her final movie - the Bing Crosby-Frank Sinatra-starring - in a dreamy tracking shot that transports her to her new life in Monaco. There she finds herself with a husband (played by Tim Roth) more interested in international politics than domestic trifles.

Dahan clearly attempts to show, as the opening quote from Kelly states, that "the idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale". The film begins in December 1961 with old friend Alfred Hitchcock - who gave Kelly three of her most celebrated roles, in , and - arriving in the principality to offer her the titular heroine in .

"For me, the movie is really about a woman who has to make a choice," says Dahan, "between a normal life with her family and Hollywood."

Part portrait of a marriage, part psychological character study, Dahan's film actually becomes a political drama as Rainier battles with French president Charles de Gaulle, who demands that the citizens of the tax-free principality pay their dues and deliver the proceeds to France - or risk Monaco facing military action. The story of the leaders of a small territory trying to stand up to its much larger and powerful neighbour may resonate with Hongkongers.