La Reine Margot (Chéreau, 1994): Cine Lumiere, 1.15pm
This film is also screened on November 18th but the screening today will be introduced by Le Monde Film Critic Samuel Blumenfeld, author of the series Adjani, The Famous Stranger published in August 2025. It is part of the French Film Festival. Details here.
Time Out review:
We lost a major talent with the 2013 passing of director Patrice
Chéreau, whose movies are marked by fierce intellect and fleshy
eroticism. His stunning 1994 period piece, Queen Margot,
adapted from Alexandre Dumas’s based-on-fact novel is a perfect introduction to
Chéreau’s unique worldview. It’s 1572 in France, and Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) has
just been married off to King Henri of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil),
ostensibly as a peace offering between the warring Catholics and
Huguenots. In truth, the union is a ruse by the Queen Mother (Virna
Lisi, frightening) to incite a wave of assassinations that will come to
be known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Regal pageantry gives way to copious carnage: Swords open necks,
wounds spurt crimson rivers, and clothes are caked in muck (you can
practically smell the stench). It’s a horrifying and strangely carnal
spectacle—imagine a Gallic-history encyclopedia written by Clive
Barker—that’s merely a prelude to the slaughter’s fallout. Marguerite
begins a passionate affair with Vincent Perez’s Protestant nobleman, La
Môle (a tragic outcome is clearly inevitable), and the French royals
find themselves on the receiving end of bizarre murder plots, like one
involving a poisoned book that makes the victim sweat their body weight
in blood. Chéreau makes us hyperaware of the literal meat of human
existence—the deep-rooted longing for companionship and the visceral
lust for survival that can be cut short with the flick of an
aristocrat’s hand. (These people aren’t the embalmed waxworks of your
garden-variety historical epic.) Death seems to linger in every inch of
the frame, yet the film lives and breathes like few others.
Keith Uhlich
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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