Catholics against Protestants in 16th-century France. Holocaustically against them in a gruesomely detailed re-enactment of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the movie's too-early centerpiece. I.e., off-center centerpiece. The swollen-cheeked Isabelle Adjani, playing a woman half her age, and playing it through a veil of soft-focus photography, camps it up as if for Cecil B. DeMille, and Virna Lisi as Catherine de Medici (quite unrecognizable as the blonde who pops out of a bachelor-party cake in How to Murder Your Wife, 1965) is scarcely less restrained except in number of minutes on screen. Patrice Chéreau's period piece is on the whole too murky, muddled, and confusing to provide very fertile soil for those two hothouse orchids. The confusing part might have something to do with the heavy editing for the American market. Or it might have something to do with the foreignness of the history. Or both. One poetic idea that surmounts all obstacles, even the lateness of its arrival: the poisoned Charles IX sweating blood on his way to a slow and agonizing death. Vincent Perez, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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