Word: chereau
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...films attract respected actors as well. The primal gropers in Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, winner of the top prize at Berlin this year, are Mark Rylance, who runs London's Globe Theatre (where last year he played Hamlet), and New Zealand-born film star Kerry Fox. As Jay and Claire, they meet each week in his dingy London flat for an afternoon of brusque passion; its appeal is its anonymity. But Jay has to learn where his mystery lover comes from. His journey will remove the final veil of flesh--the one that separates two desperate souls. Chereau ultimately pushes...
Apart from this scene, the film's first hour is unimaginably tedious. One keeps praying for the massacre to come, and when it does come, it is a beaut. Some reviewers have accused Chereau of cribbing from "Schindler's List" in this set piece, but apart from being chronologically impossible, the reviewers miss the point about visual influences. When Chereau stages the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he has the entire tradition of French art behind him. The artfully twisted limbs and contorted white bodies come not from "Schindler's List" but from The Raft of the Medusa...
...sets the tone for much of the film. Margot (Isabelle Adjani) and Henri (Daniel Auteuil), sumptuously dressed (the mind boggles at just how much Adjani's dress must have cost), kneel in the cathedral while a chorus the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings in the background. Chereau impresses the luxury and pomp of the scene upon the viewer's mind, but undermines the splendor when, after Margot refuses to say "I do," her brother Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade) hits her in the back of the head so that she assents...
...suspects that one ought to feel awe and delight, it is a pity one does not. So much money and effort spent to capture that brutal and ridiculous gesture. It's a feeling which the viewer will experience several times during the course of "Queen Margot," as if Chereau hoped to have one awestruck merely on the merits of enormous expense. It's an attitude which Louis XIV, the biggest conspicuous consumer of them all, would have understood, as a directorial technique however, it fails to deliver. After the wedding scene, "Queen Margot" disintegrates into the byzantine intrigues leading...
...massacre scenes, besides being the best part of "Queen Margot," also function as an illustration of film's subtext about ethnic cleansing. The situation in Bosnia is clearly on the film makers' minds, and Chereau re-enforces this connection through his choice of the film's composer, Goran Bregovic. Bregovic, born in Sarajevo to a Serbian mother and a Croatian father, fills "Queen Margot" with medieval Balkan melodies and the voice of Ofra Haza, which at first seem incongruous in a film so French but which later make perfect sense...