La Reine Margot: French Film Guide

Description

"La Reine Margot" is a fascinating, very modern film, big scale costume drama, but with Chereau's experimental style. Pidduck investigates in graceful style stardom, genre, sexuality and gender in a single film. The film has an international reputation, is widely available on dvd. Patrice Chereau's 1994 film "La Reine Margot" presents a theatrical chiaroscuro Renaissance past where struggles for political and religious power are entwined with plots, poisons and the pleasures and perils of the flesh. Featuring the elusive star Isabelle Adjani and Vincent Perez, the film is renowned for its eroticised and violent depiction of the period. Julianne Pidduck's "Cine-File" does full justice to this vivid film, examining it as part of an influential recent cycle of French historical 'super-productions' including "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Germinal" and exploring its social and political contexts, in particular how "La Reine Margot"'s depiction of Renaissance religious intolerance offers a haunting allegory for twentieth-century French and European experience.

Julianne Pidduck is Lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Research, Lancaster University. Author of 'Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past'.

SPLICEThe Cine-Files books assiduously shepard the reader through the text, cross-referencing each observation with earlier remarks and Pidduck leavens her discussion with nicely deployed costume detail...and an attention to the extreme physicality of Chereau's film.' Richard Armstrong