In the Flesh: La Reigne Margot

“I knew you would be beautiful… luminous,” says the injured and delirious La Môle (Vincent Perez) as he lies bleeding in his lover Margot’s (Isabelle Adjani) arms, believing her to be the angel of death. As in so much of Patrice Chéreau’s La Reigne Margot, death and sexuality are never far apart. This moment of morbid intimacy comes full circle at the close of the film when Margot fulfills her oath to La Môle by taking his severed head with her when she makes her escape from her family’s court, having promised him before his arrest and execution to “sometimes press her lips against it”. In a country torn apart by competing visions of God and the afterlife, this simple Pagan anxiety at the thought of dying, of being forgotten by one’s lover, cuts to the quick. These vast, diffuse theological forces that have claimed so many lives are only shadows cast by ordinary human fears and desires, outsize exaggerations of the mundane things that have driven us since the dawn of civilization.

Chéreau’s film has no interest in condensing historical record for viewer legibility, and its opening act is a sea of names and faces, motivations and relationships established in a few fleeting looks and sentences as the vast spectacle of the royal wedding between Margot and Henri de Bourbon (Daniel Auteuil) unfolds. The human scale of it is physically staggering, a sea of faces looking on, more extras than I’ve seen outside a battle sequence in decades, yet dwarfed by the monumental confines of the cathedral. Why does the match fail so quickly and disastrously? Is it the insecurity of Margot’s mother, Catherine de' Medici (Virna Lisa), at seeing her influence over her son’s court slip? Is it tension between Margot’s lovers and her new Protestant husband? Is it simple mistrust born out of decades of bloody war between the two factions? It’s not the kind of thing La Reigne Margot cares to spell out, but the mess made when these explanations crash together makes for scintillating drama.

And what a mess. Elaborate costumes soaked in blood and filth. Astonishing wound makeup blown past as a matter of course. A grisly boar hunt gone wrong I genuinely cannot understand how they managed to film. The dissection of a prosthetic dog carcass so realistic I spent fifteen minutes researching whether or not they had simply obtained a dead dog and found someone willing to cut it open to portray the surgeon. King Charles IX’s (Jean-Hugues Anglade) death from arsenic poisoning is likewise shockingly horrific, as is his mother and poisoner’s — the ghoulish Catherine — bedside mourning, her increasingly skull-like face twisted with hypocritical grief. It’s one of many scenes in which someone rips something beloved out of themselves only to immediately regret the sacrifice, and it’s exactly this kind of complex, muddled motivation that makes La Reigne Margot such a wonder.