Blood wedding

The costumes may be exquisite, but the director is not afraid to drag t hem through the mud. Adam Mars-Jones on Patrice Chereau's fascinating La Reine Margot

Patrice Chereau's costume drama La Reine Margot doesn't begin auspiciously. Paragraph after paragraph of text on the screen explaining the political situation in France in 1572, followed by moody images of people scheming, then a royal wedding tha t lapses into farce when the bride, Marguerite de Valois, known as Margot (Isabelle Adjani) refuses to make her vows. She needs a push in the small of the back before the ceremony can be completed, her gasp as her face connects with a cushion being const rued by the officiating prelate as "oui".

Add to this some side-of-the-mouth bickering on the way out of the cathedral from the newlyweds - "Your mother hated my mother", "Yours killed mine", "There was no proof"- and we seem to be in for a historical epic a la Woody Allen.

In fact, give or take the odd dodgy subtitle ("I fancy you, milord"), La Reine Margot turns into an engrossing experience. It is a tragic melodrama (more ambitious than most melodrama, less extreme in its workings than true tragedy) but the relative proportions of the lush and the stark - of bodice ripper and treatises on realpolitik, - vary substantially in the course of the running time. The screenplay, by the director Daniele Thompson, is drawn from a novel by Dumas - but it is not particularly faithful to Dumas's infidelities with fact, and incorporates elements too from a novel by Heinrich Mann.

The plot is generated by two overlapping triangles, one romantic and one political. The romantic one involves Margot, her husband of convenience Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) with whom she nevertheless establishes a rapport, and her lover La Mole (Vincent Perez), a visiting Protestant who finds sanctuary in her private chamber during the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. A romantic triangle, mind you, represents a simplification of the sexual geometry to which Margot is accustomed. On her we dding night she rebuffs the groom (the only sign of progress he can claim is that she is beginning to tell him to shut up more intimately, taisez-vous giving way to tais-toi) but also offends her old lover the Duc de Guise. So she goes out gowned and mas ked with her lady in waiting, to shake lovely shoulders at the Protestants bivouacking in the streets, who are in a sense her wedding guests but function for the moment more as a reservoir of grudging rough trade.

When Margot discovers true passion with La Mole, it is also a political liberation for her, but one that finds a rather soupy expression - "I'm on your side, with the victims. I'll never go back to the killers" - particularly with a righteous choir singing on the soundtrack at the time. More interesting is the way she schools her husband in political realism, not only persuading him to recant his faith tactically but saying, "We must learn about hypocrisy."

The historical Marguerite and Henri were both 19 at the time, and although Adjani can easily get away with playing a woman half her age Auteuil was visibly in his thirties in Jean de Florette, 10 years ago. He still makes a success of his performance, since his fixed stare and air of abstraction are enough to establish him as out of his depth in the corrupt court to which his wife was born.

The political triangle links Marguerite and Henri with her brother, King Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade). His is not an immediately appealing character, what with his sweating face and long greasy hair, and indeed in the film's first half hour he orders, or at lease acquiesces in, the Bartholomew's Day Massacre. He is half mad and more than half weak, but he becomes in time the film's most interesting character. Passion is Margot's escape-route; he must try something more original. In his worl d, everyrelationship is tainted: his mother Catherine de Medici, for instance, is a monstrous schemer who favours his younger brother, and practises dynastic cleansing as if it was a form of housework, which no one else would do if she didn't. His first solution is a patriarchal figure, Admiral Coligny, whose bearded cheek he strokes and whom he calls Father, but tidy-minded mum soon has him shot, so he has to think again. Then Fate throws him a brother, when Henri saves his life at a boar hunt.

Chereau is both lavish and sparing in his recreation of the past. Nothing is skimped, but there is no lingering on decorative details. The impression the film leaves is of people beautifully costumed, but treated without ceremony or even respect, struggling to survive against a backdrop of bare walls. The costumes aren't there for their own sake: the dark clothes of the Protestants, for instance, make them easy targets once the massacre begins. Beneath the costumes are flesh and blood but mostly blood.

It is in its layering of escapism and astringency, though, that the film acquires its fascination. The matriarch Catherine (Virna Lisi), for instance, seems a completely over-the-top villain, ruthlessly furthering the ends of her dynasty. Except that this political end overlaps with another, more perverse one, of not allowing anyone to get close to her sons. Consequently she defeats her own purpose, since where there are no rivals there can be no heirs, and no real succession. But if she is driven more by passion for her middle son, Anjou, than by expediency, then her killing of the King with a poisoned book intended for Henri is a sort of Freudian slip, revealing a hidden desire.

When Charles accepts his fate, which is to die in public from the slow effects of poison without endangering the dynasty by revealing the cause, he becomes king in a new way. He isn't exactly purified by his end - he is pragmatic enough to realise that ascapegoat will be necessary - but this is an extraordinary picture of isolation and suffering. It also provides Chereau's intoxicating, sobering film with its most indelible image, when the King sweats blood in his long agony, staining his clothes red from the inside.

On release from Friday