Do Americans care about the César Awards? The annual film awards ceremony is colloquially known as “The French Oscars,” but it doesn’t get nearly as much Oscars-precursor press coverage as, say, “The British Oscars” (The BAFTAs), which Americans already only barely pretend to care about. I presume a large part of that cross-cultural indifference has to do with the fact that France already has a super prestigious awards ceremony at Cannes, which tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen in that industry. Last year, for instance, Jafar Panahi’s political revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to earn great international acclaim, while The Ties that Bind Us won Best Film at The César Awards and has been heard of by no one outside the borders of France. The year before, Emilia Pérez swept the César Awards before becoming an openly mocked punchline at The Oscars, and no one knew to make fun of their French colleagues for it because no one pays attention to the Césars. I say all this to note that I have no idea how big of a deal it is that the 1994 historical drama Queen Margot won five César Awards in its qualifying year (for cinematography, costume design, and nearly every acting category), since its single, subsequent nomination for Best Costume Design at the Oscars has at best left it as a pop culture footnote. No American is picking up a used DVD copy of Queen Margot at the thrift store because it was a major player at The French Oscars; we’re picking it up because it advertises a blood-soaked Isabelle Adjani on the cover, and she has an impeccable track record of being great in movies where her character is having a bad day.

If I closed my eyes and imagined what a stereotypical film that cleans up at an event called “The French Oscars” would look like, I would picture something a lot like Queen Margot. The lavish historical drama details the big-picture atrocities and petty personal betrayals of the French royal court during the 16th Century crusades, in which the Catholics in control of the nation were eager to “convert” (i.e, kill) all Protestants by sword or die trying. It’s a staggeringly extravagant production in its scale, its costuming and, because it’s French, its sex & violence. Star Isabelle Adjani’s glamour-shot lighting is extravagant as well, with more attention paid to her stoic beauty than to her trademark talent for simulating a total mental breakdown, as featured in earlier titles like Possession, The Story of Adele H, and Camile Claudel. Of course, Adjani continues to suffer here—as that is her specialty—but she does so quietly instead of thrashing her body against the proverbial tunnel wall. She starts the movie being forced into a sham royal wedding that is either meant to end the Catholic-Protestant conflict through cross-faith marriage or meant to bait her scheming family’s enemies to a single location for convenient slaughter, depending on who you ask. Regardless, the opening wedding celebrations quickly devolve into a Paris-wide bloodbath and Adjani’s queen-to-be has to spend the rest of the movie negotiating the continued survival of both her brothers and her lovers as the conflict plays out. She has very little success in that regard and often finds herself mourning one loved one after another, but she looks great doing so, never missing the spotlight for her closeups.

By American & British costume drama standards, Queen Margot is shocking in its scale and its extremity. Whether it’s staging a celebratory post-wedding orgy or a horrific battlefield massacre, there are bodies everywhere. Every wide shot is packed with extras in exquisitely detailed costumes, often for them to be removed or destroyed depending on the mood of the moment. Every candlelit interior is warmly intimate and carefully arranged – every frame a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the sex & bloodshed are deliberately ugly & messy. Slit throats spew geysers of blood, like a visual gag from Kill Bill Vol. 1. Whenever sexually frustrated, the titular royal LARPs as a streetwalker, enjoying anonymous alley sex with peasants as if a simple half-mask could obscure a face as striking as Adjani’s. People fuck; they kill; they hunt wild boars for sport and then fuck & kill during the excitement. It’s like an overlong, over-serious episode of The Great in that way, to the point where I’d be shocked to learn that this wasn’t a formative work for screenwriter Tony MacNamara. The very best sequences find a way to combine the sex & violence into a single lethal concoction, created in a mad-scientist lab by Margot’s mother’s perfumer, who also dabbles in poisons. He creates a poisoned glove, a poisoned book, and a poisoned batch of makeup that offer a much softer, more sensual murder method than the sword-wielding brutes outside the Louvre. Of course, those poisons can be gnarly too, causing their victims to bleed to death out of every pore in prolonged agony. The movie never misses its chance to show the audience some more blood.

Queen Margot opens with a long scroll of expository text that orients the audience in its historical setting, followed by forty or so minutes of character introductions before its melodrama starts in earnest. That relatively dry intro and the film’s lingering reputation as an awards-season period piece will lead you to expect something much statelier & more subdued than what’s ultimately delivered. Once the stage is set, though, it wastes no time indulging in the grotesque sex & violence of its 16th Century royal court, where it’s totally natural to hear lovers plead, “I want to see the image of my death in my pleasure” while fucking and combatants declare, “For each one you kill a sin will be forgiven!” while fighting. It’s a real actor’s showcase in that way, with plenty space in its near-three-hour runtime for every performer in the main cast to get in their own awards show clips. Notably, Adjani did win Best Actress at the 20th César Awards for her performance as the titular lead, but at Cannes that honor went to her co-star Virna Lisi, who plays her scheming mother (Catherine, the court’s #1 poison enthusiast). Adjani already had earned two Best Actress wins at past Cannes for Possession & Quartet, but it’s still a surprising footnote among the film’s official accolades, continuing the two women’s mutually destructive onscreen power struggle to the press circuit. They did both go on to win separate acting awards at The French Oscars, but I’m still not totally sure of those statues’ worth. Hell, the American Oscars awarded two statues to the aforementioned Emilia Pérez a couple years ago, so even the ceremonies we do pay attention to are effectively a joke.

-Brandon Ledet