Sunday 14th June at 3.15pm & 7.15pm
la reine margot 1994 
English Title: Queen Margot
Director: patrice chéreau
Run Time 2h 39mins
Two hours of stabbing, shooting, goring, poisoning, incest, beheading and defenestration. A lavish and spirited adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel that brings French history kicking and screaming into the town square, although both are accepted as rambunctiously fictional versions of history
She is beautiful, she is catholic, she is the King’s sister, her name is Marguerite de Valois. Her brother has nicknamed her Margot. Henri de Navarre is protestant and said to be ill-mannered, unshaven and to smell of garlic and sweat. They are wed by force.
It is a political manoeuvre: they need to reconcile France, torn apart by religious wars. Six days after the marriage at the Notre Dame Cathedral is the Saint Bartholomew day massacre of the Huguenots. In the middle of this night of horror, a young man wounded by several sword injuries, frantically knocks on Margot’s door; La Môle because he is protestant must die like all the others. Margot hides him, nurses him and grows to love him. That night everything is thrown into confusion.
In adapting the accepted historically inaccurate Dumas novel, Chéreau’s long association with theatre and opera reaches its peak, culminating in one of the most spectacularly overblown sequences in French cinema; the bloody Huguenot massacre of 1572. In attempting to portray one of the most chaotic and violent periods of French history he knowingly takes liberties with the already tainted source material. You have been warned!
Trailer for La Reine Margot/Queen Margot
book tickets for La reine margot
Tickets cost £6