Queen Margot
Genre: Historical/Drama
Director: Chloe Zhao
Writer: Jack Slipter
Based on the novel Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Robert Pattinson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kit Harington, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Olivia Colman, James Norton, Lily Collins, Bradley Whitford, Patrick Gibson, Lucy Boynton, Sean Patrick Flanery, Alex Lawther, Barry Sloane, David Denman
Plot: France, 1572. In an attempt to put an end to the civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots (the French of Protestant religion), the former Queen Catherine de 'Medici (Olivia Colman), who remained regent of the throne of France until the age of her younger son Charles IX (Kodi Smit-McPhee) marries the libertine daughter Margaret of Valois (Saoirse Ronan), to the Spanish leader of the Protestant religion, Henry of Navarre (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). During the ceremony of August 18, 1572 in the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris, Margaret is reluctant and has a long moment of silence but is persuaded by Charles to say "Oui" to the marriage proposal, with the satisfied approval of Catherine. There are many people at the ceremony, including Margaret's brothers, Henry Count D'Anjou (Alex Lawther) and Francois Duke of Alencon (Patrick Gibson) who look at the wedding with a serious and somber air, also because of the strange promiscuous relationship they have with their sister. . Henry of Navarre is also not particularly enthusiastic about this marriage because he is convinced that his mother was murdered with poison by Catherine de Medici only a few months earlier and because he fears of being killed by some fanatic of the Catholic party.
Before leaving the cathedral, Margaret, familiarly called Margot by most people, warns her husband to introduce himself to her room. Henry accepts but in a cold and distracted way because he is very intrigued by the advances of the beautiful and provocative courtesan Madamoiselle de Sauve (Lucy Boynton). So, after seeing Henry Margot's attitude, she confides in her lady-in-waiting Henriette de Nevers (Lily Collins) who amusedly advises her to invite Henry de Guise (James Norton), Margot's lover, for the night. He is disappointed in the marriage of his beloved to another man, moreover Protestant. In fact, De Guise is a member of the most important Catholic family after the royal one.
After the reconciliation with marriage was sealed, Admiral de Coligny (Sean Patrick Flanery), head of the largest Huguenot family and new adviser to the king, convinced him to wage war against Catholic Spain in Flanders, also relying on the massive presence of armed Huguenots in city intervened for the wedding. However, the conflict is strongly opposed by the Catholic part of France and when Catherine finds out she goes on a rampage. At this point, unbeknownst to the king, she secretly assigns a hitman to assassinate Coligny.
The first wedding night Margot is in her room who is waiting for De Guise and she hears a knock on her door and when she goes to open the door she is unexpectedly confronted by her husband who offers her a pact. she will help him move to court without risking to be assassinated and he promises her to become queen of France despite the king's brothers being in front of him in the line of inheritance. Margot, albeit with hesitation, accepts and Henry leaves. Margot sits on the bed to think about her husband's words but her thoughts are disturbed by the arrival of de Guise. The man says he has listened to everything and starts to fight hard with the woman. After being pushed onto the bed, she gets up and slaps him hard and orders him to leave immediately. At that point she calls Henriette who arrives shortly after.
The two women decide to go out in search of a man to have fun, as for Margot it must have been the first night after the wedding. Both women walk the streets of Paris with a white mask on their face to avoid being recognized. Meanwhile, in the large crowd that arrived in Paris for the wedding there are also two provincial nobles who soon become friends: the Piedmontese Catholic Annibal de Coconnas (Kit Harington) and the Provençal Protestant Hyacynthe Lerac de La Mole (Robert Pattinson), who reside in the same inn. In fact, La Mole had been robbed of all his belongings, including his horse, and Coconnas had offered to pay him for his stay in the inn. As Margot and Henriette stroll they see a well-groomed and handsome man smoking near the entrance to an inn. Henriette pushes Margot towards him and, despite Margot pretending to be a prostitute, they start a rather cultured conversation which later leads them to have a furtive affair in his room with hers.
The next day, shortly after dawn, the assassin catches up and shoots Admiral Coligny in the street, seriously but not fatally wounding him. The Huguenots are in turmoil and would like to avenge the attack immediately. Margot, awakened near La Mole from the confusion that she has begun to wind through the streets of Paris, quickly goes to the royal palace of the Louvre to persuade her husband to flee to England, but she is chased away by his companions. she at their headquarters to warn her husband to flee to England, but she is chased away by his companions before she can warn her. In the meantime, the most important Catholic members, Caterina with her children Francois and Henry and the Guise family, managed to convince the weak king of the need to strike first in order not to suffer the initiative of the thousands of Huguenots who arrived in Paris for the wedding because they are thinking about revenge. King Charles gives his assent, abandoning Coligny to his fate despite the good relationship between the two of them. The king, however, fearing being accused by the survivors asks for a real bloodbath. Catherine has the opportunity to persuade her son to change his mind and hit only the Huguenot leaders but avoids doing so. The situation then quickly worsened and chaos broke out in Paris.
At the stroke of midnight between 23 and 24 August 1572, on the night of St. Bartholomew, hundreds of Catholics armed by the Crown and the most important Catholic families attack by surprise the Protestants quartered in the Louvre and in the streets of the city, making a real e massacre of thousands of Huguenots, not even sparing women and children. Coligny is in his room in a precarious condition after the assassination attempt and feels a great confusion coming out of the streets. He immediately understands what is happening and tries to escape but is quickly reached and pushed out of the window and his corpse is destroyed.
Meanwhile, La Mole escaped the initial attack by managing to hide and escape onto the rooftops. However, he is seen and chased by a group of men, including Coconnas who recognizes the man he had helped a few days earlier. The Mole is captured for a brief moment and also injured. He tries to turn to Coconnas asking him to be pardoned but the other reluctantly says that it is his obligation to do so. The Mole, taking advantage of a moment of distraction from the enemies, manages to wriggle out and escape again. La Mole finds herself in the Louvre and decides to take refuge there to heal her wounds despite all the corpses that are in the corridors and in the courtyard. La Mole, with his clothes soaked in his blood and not his, walks carefully without being seen by anyone, finding herself casually in front of Margot's rooms. La Mole hears voices and enters one of the doors finding herself face to face with Margot. Initially the woman is frightened but then she recognizes him and hides him saving him from his persecutors when some of them enter the room looking for him. At that point she calls Henriette and orders her to look for bandages to medicate the man while she goes to her husband to try save him from the probable death, hardly convincing him to convert to Catholicism. In fact Henry had been summoned by the king who had ordered him to convert to Catholicism but had refused. At that point the king gave him two hours to reflect. Margot goes to her husband and although there is no love between the two, she manages to convince him to convert.
Meanwhile, despite her injuries, La Môle manages to escape Henriette's guard and leaves the royal apartments but runs into Coconas again, who is also injured. The two begin to fight hard to the end of their strength and both faint from injuries from fatigue. Both are found lifeless and believed dead, transported by the executioner (David Denman) to the mass graves outside the walls, where the thousands of bodies of the victims of the massacre are thrown, but when the man realizes that they are still alive, he takes them home. own to cure them. La Môle, who has only Margot in her thoughts, begins to recover and tells the executioner how he met her. During the tale it is revealed that Henriette is a distant relative of the executioner. At that point the executioner, who until then had avoided saying her name, says his name is Jean Gougnon. Coconnas, on the other hand, struggles to recover despite treatment and is unconscious for much of the time, despite mumbling in his sleep asking forgiveness for his actions the previous night.
Meanwhile Margot accuses the family, especially Catherine, of having only used her to attract the Protestants to Paris with the wedding ceremony, only to massacre them, throwing her into disgrace. Caterina makes an attempt to convince her daughter to divorce Henry since the marriage has not yet been consummated but given her rebellion, Caterina then forces her to remain locked in the palace with her husband, practically held prisoner despite her conversion.
The following day the royal court organizes a pilgrimage on horseback to the place outside the walls where the horribly mutilated corpses of Admiral Coligny and the other most important Huguenots were hanged. Even the newly converted Henry and the furious Margot are forced to participate in order not to offer excuses to Caterina. During the ceremony Henry is targeted and mocked by De Guise and the most important Catholic exponents but manages not to react despite the evident anger.
The next day the two men go to the shop of the Florentine fortune teller René to question him if they are reciprocated by the women they love and during this happens, as if by magic, Henriette and Margot arrive. As they hug, however, they all have to flee from the back because René is waiting for the queen mother. Caterina arrives to let her fellow citizen read her future in the bowels of two sacrificed hens. Her response is always the same: her three sons will die one after the other and Henry of Navarre will be king of France. Catherine wants to repeat the divination, but with a human brain. At that point she leaves raising her voice and cursing.
Renè breathes a sigh of relief until he realizes that the queen mother has stolen a quantity of poison and realizes the use he wants to make of it. It is a race against time but the man manages to intervene just in time preventing Charlotte de Sauve from inadvertently poisoning her lover Henry of Navarre. At that point René tells him the prophecy that he will become king of France. Subsequently, therefore, when the Huguenot de Mouy manages to enter the Louvre in disguise, at the risk of his life, to inform him that there is an organization ready to make him escape and repair in Navarre, Enrico categorically refuses.
D'Alençon, who is Catherine's third son and very distant from the throne, proposes himself to Mouy as the new head of the Huguenot faction. Mouy will ask the bosses about him and will return to the Louvre with the answer, wearing the flamboyant cloak of La Mole. Returning to dinner in the inn where they once stayed, La Mole and Coconnas receive a mysterious gallant invitation, are blindfolded and ushered separately into a building where they live a night of passion with two mysterious anonymous ladies, but it is not necessary to have imagination to understand that yes. treats of Queen Margaret and Henriette.
At night, in the Louvre, Margherita intercepts Mouy, believing it to be La Mole; the Huguenot is put face to face with Henry of Navarre, who confesses that he did not tell him the truth because he knew he was being spied on by the Duke of Alençon, in reality nothing has changed for him. Meanwhile, Margherita tells everything to La Mole who swears that he is always on her side because he is in love with her, and asks her in turn to take her head with him in case he should lose it for her, as it is whispered that the queen does with the heart of lovers.
A messenger arrives at the Louvre with the news that Henry Duke of Anjou, the king's younger brother, has been chosen by the nobles as king of Poland. The election was ratified by the Pope. Terrified by René's prophecy that he sees a triple death in the royal family, and fearing that Henry of Navarre could succeed his children, Catherine obtained a "lettre de cachet" from the king to imprison him without trial. to the Bastille; she assigning a famous masked killer to carry out the execution, she advises him not to have any qualms about killing him if she resists.
King Charles and the court set out on a wild boar hunt, during which Henry of Navarre refused an escape attempt that was proposed to him by friends. The king, thrown and fallen, is ferociously attacked by the angry boar; his brother d'Alençon strangely misses the gunshot despite being a skilled marksman, and only Henry of Navarre's intervention with the knife saves the king from a fatal wound.
To repay Henry's intervention against the boar, the king keeps him out of the Louvre on the evening when Catherine's chosen killer must arrest him. Having gone out at night, the two meet Henry of Guise and the brother of the king (and future king of Poland), who has returned secretly from the siege of La Rochelle and discover Henriette's intrigues. The Duchess has secluded with Queen Margot and her two lovers in an anonymous house, but when they are surprised by her four they manage to escape through a secret door after being almost captured.
Meanwhile, having broken into Henry of Navarre's apartment in the Louvre to arrest him, the masked killer surprises de Mouy killing two of the assailants and wounding him in the throat. However, everyone has seen his scarlet cloak and many are interested in saying that it was La Mole who killed, so as not to compromise the plans of the king of Navarre. However, while he is in Margot's room, Enrico warns him to flee, so the young la Mole escapes a deadly ambush.
However, when the wounded murderer is able to speak it will be discovered that the Huguenot de Mouy was in Enrico's apartment, which will eventually be compromised. La Mole serves as a messenger between the Huguenots and the converted king of Navarre to make him escape the Louvre and close surveillance. Meanwhile, King Charles is in a hurry to send his younger brother to reign over Poland because he knows that his mother Catherine would prefer to see him on the throne instead of her. Catherine would instead like to delay her departure because René divined the king's death within a year.
Caterina had the Florentine René prepare a book on the art of hunting with the pages soaked in poison, and had it delivered to Enrico's room; but the king sees it first and seizes it not knowing that the book was poisoned. A few days later he has the first severe symptoms of poisoning.
The Huguenot nobles prepared the flight and expatriation of Henry, Margot and the Duke of Alençon, who proposed himself as the new leader of the Protestants; but the latter withdraws at the last moment and denounces the plot. Many Huguenot nobles are captured, but Henry manages to prove his strangeness, as well as La Mole and Coconnas who are nevertheless arrested.
In the same hours the king's beloved dog dies poisoned, Charles realizes that he has eaten pages of the book that he himself has leafed through. Terrified, he summons René and makes him confess that the hunting treaty is steeped in a drug destined for the king of Navarre. There is no antidote.
Henry explicitly asks the king to have him locked up, to pretend that he has fallen from grace and to avoid further attempts on his life; he ends up at the castle of Vincennes where La Mole and Coconnas are also locked up. Knowing that he had been poisoned to death, in order to save his family, King Charles prefers that the blame not fall on his mother, and agrees that La Mole be accused of witchcraft: in fact, in his rooms a wax figurine was found pierced by a pin, and despite René prepared it to make Margot fall in love, the judges argue that it is a spell against the king.
Margot and Henriette prepare the two men's escape, but La Mole is unable to stand up because he has been tortured and has broken legs. Coconnas would have the opportunity to escape but accepts the same fate out of friendship. The two women are desperate but reluctantly accept the decision of the two men. The two are beheaded. Later the executioner gives La Mole's head to Queen Margot, who had promised to keep it with him.
Meanwhile on his deathbed, King Charles entrusted the regency to Henry of Navarre, while waiting for his brother Henry to return from Poland; at the same time he writes to the Polish court to prevent him from leaving the country. According to his drawings, it will be his brother-in-law who will inherit the crown of France, but Catherine has already had her son recalled, who arrives at a beat just as the king exhales his last breath.
Henry of Navarre is forced to flee from Paris; Henry Count of Anjou becomes King Henry III of France. A year later, the king of Navarre returns to the capital of France to clandestinely meet her lover Charlotte de Sauve, Catherine learns of it and ambushes him, which is not successful. Henry of Navarre manages to escape once again, but not before the Florentine René renews his prediction that one day he will be king of France.
No comments:
Post a Comment