CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
PATRICE CHEREAU’S Queen Margot begins with a wedding and=20 ends with a coronation. In between there is a lengthy and=20 operatic treatment of religious strife and the fall of a=20
If Wagner — Chereau staged The Ring at Bayreuth in the=20 1970s — and Visconti come to mind, the sources of the film=20 are actual history and Alexandre Dumas’ novel. The film is=20 dislocated into a series of ceremonies, entertainments, and=20 private encounters, both political and romantic.
In his notes on the writing of Queen Margot, Chereau speaks=20 about the influence of Elizabethan drama, in particular=20 that of Marlowe and Shakespeare, on his screenplay. These=20 dramatists are turned by Chereau into psychologists or=20 novelists or film-makers. The frame of the action=20 constantly alters. In a film of elephantine scope, marriage=20 festivals, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, hunts and=20 storms, funeral ceremonies and coronations are all jumbled=20
There is seldom any suggestion that Chereau is attempting=20 either to clarify or exemplify the contradictions and=20 stresses of the political and economic order of France in=20 the late 16th century, or for that matter of our century,=20 despite the many modernisms, both sexual and political, in=20 the film. Images of the slaughtered Protestants (6 000 were=20 massacred on a single night), naked and in mass graves, are=20 meant to recall the Holocaust. All of this is quite=20
Chereau exhibits a fascination with ways of dying and=20 perfume: lips are rouged with poison, the pages of a book=20 are stuck together with arsenic. And that family sport,=20 incest, is played with great zest and ardour by mother=20 (Catherine de Medici, acted with splendid malevolence by=20 Virna Lisi) and sons, sister and brothers.
Death in the film is always voluptuous and erotically=20 asymmetrical. We never see Margot (Isabelle Adjani, a=20 perfect blank) as Queen, but others of her ilk abound in=20 the film which possesses an extraordinary homoerotocism.=20 The embraces between men are always intimate. The=20 gentleman-in-waiting who dresses or undresses Charles IX=20 (Jean-Hughes Anglade) does so most caressingly. Catholic=20 Coconnas (Claudio Amendola) and Protestant La M=99le (Vincent=20 Perez, another perfect blank) who share a bed at the=20 beginning of the film are buried in the same grave at the=20 end: strange bedfellows indeed.
Queen Margot is, in fact, a kind of illicit sex-film.=20 Margot, before she enters into an alliance with Henri of=20 Navarre that is both marital (unconsummated) and political=20 (largely expedient), is seen initially as a whore, of=20 Babylon or of Paris. Her wedding feast resembles a=20
Chereau’s freewheeling style and Margot’s discussion of men=20 and their sexual attractiveness is often refreshing.=20 Equally stimulating is a sequence in which Margot, masked,=20 seeks a partner other than her husband on her wedding night=20 and goes cruising. Her adventure culminates in the screwing=20 of La M=99le, who turns out to be the film’s romantic hero=20 and is pure Dumas.
Cinematographer Phillipe Rousellot (Diva and Interview with=20 the Vampire) makes the most of the many splendid locations=20 and there is a boar hunt which is reminiscent of=20 Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Solemn chants and anthems=20 punctuate the sound-track at regular intervals.=20
At times the plot is nicely and entertainingly intricate,=20 but if Chereau offers a sense of the tantalising, the=20 forbidden, the arcane (victims of arsenic sweat blood), he=20 too often encourages impatience and boredom.Valley of a=20 thousand delights