10 thoughts on “TBT: Queen Margot (1994)

  1. I love this movie and can’t help loving the costumes as well, despite being some kind of fantasy. i think it is because I feel they fit what the movie is trying to say, it isn’t there to please an audience who some producer think can’t handle authencity, like The Tudors and Reign.

    On a complete sidenotes, in Sweden in the 19th century, peasant women used to wear their top skirt like a cape, like Margot, when it rained. Evidently it was sometimes weather proofed.

      1. The costumes in this film are brilliant! Expressive. narrative, sexy, controlled-with a strong, consistent point of view. The film is so all-of-a-piece , that the historical inaccuracy isn’t a problem. Just let the breathtakingness wash over you!! The Tudors, on the other hand…could only peek through my fingers.

  2. I don’t sweat the inauthenticity of costumes in this movie, because the costumes are so effective in communicating character. And they’re so beautiful and authentically rich and regal looking!
    Also, the 19th-c novel that this movie is based on was already “fan fiction” about the 16th-century — Dumas in 1845 wasn’t trying to write accurate history, but to conjure up a bygone heroic era in French history when people followed their passions and “lived large” in defiance of the rules, when people were willing to kill or die for their desires and ambitions. He wasn’t limited by facts about the actual 16th century, but used that period and those historical figures as a sort of theater for his own ideas about “look how awesome we French used to be, compared with our pallid bureaucratic bourgeois lives now”.

    [Which, arguably, is what historical fiction is always doing: DISCUSS]

    1. Yes! re: historical fiction. And, I can make more allowances for impressionistic costuming in historical-fiction-as-source than actual-history-as-source.

  3. Still, I would take this over Reign by a mile. And Margot’s white bloodstained dress would be an epic Halloween costume. (I toyed with making it this year, though lack of time worked against me XD)
    Also, Vincent Perez in this movie is oh myyyyyyyyyyyy… That man reached the peak of hotness here and in “Cyrano de Bergerac”

  4. Isabelle Adjani’s strange hairstyles in this film were designed to cover the scars from her facelift which was done at a time when such procedures left scars in front of the ears. While I enjoyed this film for its utter silliness, it is one of the worst examples of contempt for actual history made in the late 20th century.

  5. I just found your blog and have been binge-reading it for nigh on six hours now. I am enthralled and also impressed by your knowledge.
    I agree with the commenter before me who pointed out that the source material of this movie hardly set it up for historical accuracy, but it’s fun and (as you mentioned) adequately emotionally portrays what it needs.

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