Queen Margot

Paris, 1572. The marriage between Marguerite de Valois, the sister of King Charles IX (Isabelle Adjani), and Henry de Bourbon, King of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), was to have been an act of rapprochement between the Catholics and Protestants. Instead of finally bringing peace to a country torn apart for many years by deep-rooted religious wars, it led six days later to one of the darkest episodes in the history of France, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which around six thousand Protestants were brutally murdered. The origins, development and consequences of this massacre, seen through the literary lens of Alexandre Dumas, gave Patrice Chéreau the theme for his most unstinting and lavish film project to date. He stages the events of those August days with Baroque-inspired ostentation and splendour, and also with brutality, the whole conceived as a major theatrical spectacle. He deftly combines dazzling artistic, supremely dramatic stylisation with film realism, and great history with minor chronicles, in the same way that the power struggle at the Parisian court, with its intrigue, treachery, fear and barbarity, is interwoven with the destinies of the pawns in this bloody chess game; here, love affairs can only be conducted in secret and with tragic consequences. In Czech distribution, as in the rest of Europe and in the United States, the film was screened in its shortened, 145-minute version. The original version, lasting 161 minutes, was shown only in France, at the festival in Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize and Best Actress award for Virna Lisi as Catherine de Médicis. Queen Margot also received five César national film awards in France.