The story of this film, its history, is the History of France, our History. It is also a eulogy of tolerance. Through the bleak odium, the storms and the destruction of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, a fragile hope was born: a reconciled France, under the leadership of King Henri IV. The story of this film is the story of a woman, Margot. Daughter of a king, sister of a king, wife of a king, she will leave the side of the victors for the side of the vanquished. She will leave the side of the oppressors to side with the oppressed. She will learn about persecuted beliefs, injustice and hatred, thanks to the two men in her life. The story of this film is also the story of those two men: Henri, who became Henri IV, and La Môle, an idealistic Protestant, both pure and fierce, who will give his life for Margot. It is also the story of a family, a monstrous family gathered around a paradoxical mother Catherine of Medici. Shrouded in black, in everlasting mourning, she rules over everything. It is said she owns a set of keys with which she may open every door in the Louvre. Nothing escapes her, nothing remains a secret from her.  She has three sons, but none will have children. So it is also the end of a family, the end of a condemned lineage. It is also the time of the Wars of Religion. We shall have to show this pagan yet fanatical period, to show how religious and sensuous it was, show death alongside the pleasures of the flesh, the feeling of sin alongside the taste for pleasure. A period in which death did not count. For it is a Shakespeare and Marlowe that one must find in this movie. It also means showing today’s History as seen through the prism of the Renaissance. It means finding both the form of great cinematography, incredibly mobile and flexible (John Huston maybe, especially Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese), but also finding the power of today’s documentaries, the ‘News’ that television sometimes shows us, and that obliges us to look the brutality of our time straight in the eye.

Patrice Chéreau