Word: margot
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...artfully twisted limbs and contorted white bodies come not from "Schindler's List" but from The Raft of the Medusa and The Death of Sardanapalus. Delacroix and Gericault sit on Chereau's shoulders like twin angels of visual excess. (Chereau also includes nods to Rembrandt; Pascal Greggory as Margot's brother Anjou is a dead ringer for Rembrandt's Polish Rider...
...Queen Margot," based on the eponymous novel by Alexandre Dumas, recounts the events surrounding the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. At the time, religious differences threatened the stability of the French kingdom; the Catholic crown and the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were at each other's throats. In an effort to effect a reconciliation, the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, arranged a marriage between her daughter Margot and the Protestant Henri of Navarre. The peace that the marriage was to bring about did not last; six days after the wedding, Catholics slaughtered 3,000 Huguenots...
...even this briefest of summaries will convey, the plot of "Queen Margot" is convoluted. In the European version, the film began in medias res, on the day of the wedding. For the benefit of Americans, for whom the sacred history of France is not second nature, the producers have added a lengthy explanatory prologue, much like David Lynch did in "Dune." While the prologue does help to clarify some things, it cannot disguise the fact that director Patrice Chereau, most famous for staging Wagner's Ring in Bayreuth, has a poor command of film narrative...
...introductory wedding scene is rather impressive and sets the tone for much of the film. Margot (Isabelle Adjani) and Henri (Daniel Auteuil), sumptuously dressed (the mind boggles at just how much Adjani's dress must have cost), kneel in the cathedral while a chorus the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings in the background. Chereau impresses the luxury and pomp of the scene upon the viewer's mind, but undermines the splendor when, after Margot refuses to say "I do," her brother Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade) hits her in the back of the head so that she assents...
...suspects that one ought to feel awe and delight, it is a pity one does not. So much money and effort spent to capture that brutal and ridiculous gesture. It's a feeling which the viewer will experience several times during the course of "Queen Margot," as if Chereau hoped to have one awestruck merely on the merits of enormous expense. It's an attitude which Louis XIV, the biggest conspicuous consumer of them all, would have understood, as a directorial technique however, it fails to deliver. After the wedding scene, "Queen Margot" disintegrates into the byzantine intrigues leading...