Why did I wait so long to read Alexandre Dumas? One of literature’s all-time best-sellers, he had to be doing something right. The grandson of a French nobleman and a African slave, Dumas (1802-70) was as unlikely as one of his own plots, and no less successful. He spent money as fast as he made it, much of it on his mistresses. He is said to have written 200 books, although it’s hard to keep track as they traverse so many genres, and were often serialised on first publication. One of the secrets of his productivity was his buddy Auguste Maquet, who did the historical research, laying out plot and characters. Dumas’s role was to whip up the ingredients into a fabulous confection for readers to devour.
Although he virtually invented the potboiler, Dumas’s books have a panache that distinguishes them from those lifeless popular squibs written to a formula. The author’s own wit and joie-de-vivre finds its way into every scene, bringing historical figures to life on the page.
The Three Musketeers (1844) remains Dumas’s best-known novel, closely followed by The Count of Monte Christo (1844-46). Almost 200 movies have been made from his books, most of them ‘swashbuckling’ – a word the French had to learn.
Director Martin Bourboulon thought there was still a lot of life in Dumas’s classic tale and has been rewarded for his confidence. The Three Musketeers – Part 1: D’Artagnan, released in April 2023, became the third highest grossing French film in France, selling 3.4 million tickets at the box office. The second part, Milady, came along in December and has continued the successful run. It was an obvious choice for the opening night of this year’s French Film Festival.
It’s a mild shock when Part 1 finishes on a cliff-hanger, leaving the story to be completed in Part 2. For French audiences, this entailed a wait of eight months, during which their enthusiasm may have grown or dwindled. Palace are removing the suspense by showing both movies as a double bill, which is self-evidently the best option, although many will have already seen Part 1.
Bourboulon and his writers, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, have taken numerous liberties with Dumas’s plot, but preserved its breathless sense of adventure. The sets and costumes are much superior to earlier adaptations, capturing the grimy texture of life in the 17th century, not to mention the poor lighting from torches and candles. Even the swordsmanship has a brisk, visceral feel, far removed from the long, stagey duels of the cinema past. The stunts have been created on set, not in the computer.
François Civil is well cast as the young D’Artagnan, who travels from Gascony with the intention of becoming a musketeer at the court of Louis XIII. His fellow swashbucklers are just as credible, with Vincent Cassel as Athos, Romain Duris as Aramis, and Pio Marmaï as Porthos. Louis Garrel as Louis XIII is a more commanding figure than he is in the novel. Vicky Krieps has form playing the Queen, Anne of Austria, coming off her role in Corsage (2022), as Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Eric Ruf’s Cardinal Richelieu is low key, but reliably aloof and sinister. The big promotion goes to Eva Green’s character, Milady, who is a major force in this story from the first scenes. In Part 2, as the title suggests, she is even more dominant.
To justify Milady’s heightened visibility she has been transformed into a kind of supervillain who seems to do evil deeds for sheer pleasure, and is capable of the most extraordinary feats. If Dumas was extravagant in his invention, the scriptwriters have gone even further, as signalled by a rejigged opening chapter that goes completely over-the-top. The character of Rochefort, whom D’Artagnan sees as his nemesis in the book, is rendered almost anonymous. It seems remarkable in a later scene when our hero recognises this bad guy and sets off in pursuit, because he will be a blank for most viewers, as he was for me.
As is so often the case with an adaptation of a famous book, there are disjunctions in the narrative where the writers seem to assume our prior knowledge; in-house references that only Dumas fans will get, and new inventions that aim to bring the story up-to-date. The most gratuitous moment is the announcement that Porthos is bisexual, which would have been news to Dumas. This innovation adds nothing to the plot and seems to be merely a nod to our modish obsession with gender diversity.
At least the filmmakers have resisted the temptation to make the Musketeers black or Asian, following the concept of ‘colour-blind’ casting that has turned every recent British rendition of Shakespeare or English history into a celebration of multiculturalism. The rationale seems to be a kind of revenge on Hollywood for casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan, or Liz Taylor as Cleopatra. And so one historical travesty is heaped upon another.
It’s not until Part 2: Milady that a black actor appears, in the form of army commander, Hannibal (Ralph Amoussou). There is also a plan for Pathé and Disney to produce two spin-off mini-series, Milady Origins and The Black Musketeer, but we don’t know anything about these ventures apart from the working titles. If you have a hankering to see a black actor play D’Artagnan, you might want to check out a British adaptation released last year to almost universal scorn.
It should be noted that Madame Bonacieux, played by young French-Algerian actor, Lyna Khoudri, is a far more credible piece of casting than Richard Lester’s choice in the 1973 version of the story, the bestknown of the earlier movies based on The Three Musketeers. In that Hollywood pantomime the young, charming Madame Bonacieux was played by Raquel Welch, with Spike Milligan as her husband! (Not to mention Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu). Bourboulon has eliminated the elderly Monsieur Bonacieux altogether, necessitating some rearrangements of the plot, turning D’Artagnan’s adulterous ambitions into pure romance. It’s part of a general rejection of Dumas’s comic esprit, supplied in the novel by the pathetic Bonacieux, by the Musketeers’ valets, who have also gone missing, and by lengthy passages detailing Aramis’s devotion to the Church. Making Porthos queer is a poor compensation.
Don’t expect profundity from these films. They are pure fairy floss, or Barbe à papa(“daddy’s beard”), as the French say. What’s most appealing is that French filmmakers are reclaiming the Dumas stories and creating convincingly gallic versions, with The Three Musketeers soon to be followed by The Count of Monte Christo, directed by scriptwriters, Delaporte and De la Patellière, with Pierre Niney as Edmond Dantès. Given a choice between these flamboyant historical romances and the monotonous CGI-sci-fi of the Marvel Comics Universe or Star Wars, I’ll happily take my escapism from the past rather than the future.
The Three Musketeers – Part 1: D’Artagnan, Part 2: Milady
Directed by Martin Bourboulon
Written by Matthieu Delaporte & Alexandre de la Patellière, after a novel by Alexandre Dumas (père)
Starring: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Pio Marmaï, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Vicky Krieps, Lyna Khoudri, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Eric Ruf, Marc Barbé, Julien Frison
France/Germany/Spain/Belgium, M, 121 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 8 June, 2024