Queen Margot (1994, Patrice Chéreau) (Patreon)

51/100

Everybody's sayin' that it's so damn gory but it's still Dumas père to me. Skipped this in '94* because the Harvey Scissorhandsed version received somewhat mixed reviews and because historical drama, even when filtered through literature, isn't really my thing, for basically the same reason that biopics rarely wow me. Margot's reputation among U.S. critics improved mightily a few years ago, when Cohen released a restored cut (which is what I watched—though, oddly, this does include the red-cloak scene that Weinstein insisted Chéreau restore), but it's pretty much the film I'd always assumed it was—just a lot bloodier. Normally, I'd attribute its plodding shapelessness to misguided fidelity (whether to history, Dumas, or both); as it happens, though, The Favourite only just demonstrated that it's possible to be richly imaginative while sticking to the broad strokes of what actually went down hundreds of years ago. Had Lanthimos' film split its attention (for nearly three hours) between a Harlequin-shallow hetero romance and actually chronicling the War of Spanish Succession, wide-angle lenses wouldn't have been my primary complaint. 

Furthermore, who is Margot? Dumas' choice to foreground the queen consort suggests an alternative view of this particular conflict, and maybe that's what the novel (unread by me) offers. As played by Adjani, however, she's mostly a mishmash of barely governable impulses, defined entirely by her feelings toward Henri and La Môle. The practical arrangement she forges with the former might have been more compelling had it not been been pitted against her purely carnal desire for the latter; regardless, there's precious little in the way of an inner life, as Dumas and/or Chéreau continually abandon Margot in order to check in on, say, Charles' secret family. Indeed, the film ultimately seems more interested in Charles (rendered memorably piteous by Jean-Hugues Anglade) than in any of the ostensible leads, affording him an emotional throughline that the others sorely lack. Apart from the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which Chéreau orchestrates for maximum horror (somehow enhanced by Goran Bregovic's** loping, anachronistic score for that sequence), the most arresting stretch of the film involves Charles' accidental poisoning, which perhaps not coincidentally is a plot twist that Dumas invented. Everything else felt typically staid to me, encapsulated by Catherine de' Medici's dry observation: "What is betrayal but one's skill in following the flow of events?" That's a great line, actually, but it's also the only one that stood out enough for me to jot it down.

Oh, and Dominique Blanc kicks blithe, sardonic ass as Henriette. I wanted the movie to be about her...which The Favourite basically is, x 2. (Abigail and Sarah.) 

*I didn't become a Cannes Competition completist until 2002, when I started attending the festival myself. Have long meant to work my way back through earlier Competition slates, but just revisiting the canon in general may well occupy the rest of my life, at this rate.

**Just belatedly looked Bregovic up (after posting this) and discovered that he wrote the music for Kusturica’s Underground, the frenetic opening fanfare for which I still vividly remember even though I’ve only seen the movie once, over 20 years ago.