Queen Margot

Paris, 1572. Marguerite de Valois, a Catholic, is married to the Protestant Henri of Navarre as a political settlement. Neither of them wants it. Six days after the wedding the massacre of Protestants begins in the city, and the palace stops being a place insulated from the killing outside. The subject is not history but the body as an instrument of politics. Marguerite's marriage is a treaty, her brothers' illness a calculation, her mother's poisons a mode of government. The film shows this not as abstract intrigue but as sweat, blood and crowds. The form is suffocating. The camera moves inside the crush, the corridors are narrow, the light is scarce. The St Bartholomew's night sequence is long and unbroken; the massacre is shot not as heroism or tableau but as panic. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1994 and Virna Lisi, playing Catherine de Medici, was named best actress. What followed is less known: when the film lost money, the producer Claude Berri accepted Miramax's demand for a re-edit. The American version was cut to 143 minutes with a hundred and ninety cuts and a replaced score. Two different films are therefore in circulation. Isabelle Adjani leads, with Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade and Vincent Perez in the cast. Patrice Chéreau directs. Who it is for: viewers who like historical drama and hard costume films. Who it is not for: anyone who runs into the short version; check which cut you are watching, the difference is large.