This review is reprinted from an earlier date because the movie’s opening was delayed
With flashing swords and heaving bosoms, we go from battlefields to boudoirs in “The Princess of Montpensier,” based on a 1662 novel about the Wars of Religion, the struggle between French Catholics and Protestants that took up most of the second half of the 16th century. Bedroom behavior was less tainted by religion, but attitudes hadn’t changed much four centuries later when Simone de Beauvior wrote “The Second Sex.”
Melanie Thierry, as Marie of Mezieres, is young, blonde, well-rounded and pulsatingly virginal when the movie opens. Unfortunately, she soon becomes a pawn in a struggle over land, prestige and position. She loves a brave warriors, Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), but her father, the Marquise of Mezieres, insists that she marry the prince of Montpensier (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), largely because he’s offered a large chunk of land. And like a good daughter, she does.
Her new husband is off to the war, but does not want her hanging around the rather bawdy life of Paris, where temptation lies behind every tapestry, so he ships her off to a rural site and makes arrangements for her education at the hands of the movie’s real star, Lambert Wilson, as the Comte des Chabannes. He’s a nobleman, too, of course, but he’s literate, speaks several languages, knows botany and bird-watching in addition to swordsmanship. We see him during battles in the opening scenes, and after a particularly grisly moment, he takes an oath that he will fight no more wars. The prince sees Chabannes as no sexual threat and the perfect man to teach Marie the necessary facts of life to be successful.
Wilson is simply terrific, as a learned man in an unlettered universe, a wise and good teacher and, of course, as a man who has lots of demons to fight. It’s a glorious, nicely restrained performance. Thierry is very good, too, but she doesn’t need many acting skills to make an impression.
Director Bertrand Tavernier, who collaborated on the screenplay with Jean Cosmus and Francois-Olivier Rousseau, is a skilled veteran on large-cast movies with plenty of action, and this is a visual treat.
The Princess of Montpensier opens today
—Joe