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    ‘The Three Musketeers’ and the Joy of Old-School Blockbusters

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    With its practical effects and broad-minded approach to story, the French franchise revives the pleasures of earlier movie spectacles, but with a Gallic twist.“The Three Musketeers” is to France what Mickey Mouse is to America — a cultural force with a lock on the country’s imagination. The 19th-century cloak-and-dagger tale, written by Alexandre Dumas, has lived countless lives onstage and onscreen, with stars including Charlie Sheen, Charlton Heston, Milla Jovovich and even Barbie resurrecting the classic tale of the Kings guard. It’s as iconically French as the Eiffel Tower, yet, until recently, it had been more than 60 years since the last French movie adaptation.Enter “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” and “Milady,” a gritty two-film franchise by the director Martin Bourboulon that seeks to reclaim this legacy in a major way.“Milady,” the second installment, was released in European theaters earlier this month; “D’Artagnan” played in Europe last spring and is currently available in the United States on demand.Boasting a cast of French national treasures (like Louis Garrel and Romain Duris) and stars with global appeal (like Vincent Cassel, Eva Green and Vicky Krieps), these twin French-language productions were conceived as offensives against the tyranny of Hollywood movies that continue to dominate the French box office. At the end of 2022, not a single French-language production made it onto the list of the year’s top 10 highest-grossing films, signaling a crisis for a country whose cinematic heritage is a point of national pride.“In France, we have the talent, stories, and technicians to make blockbusters that can compete against American offerings,” Bourboulon said. “Big movies shouldn’t be made only by American studios, so we were inspired to take them on.”Shot back-to-back, the two films were completed on a budget of $78 million, financed by partners in France, Germany, Spain and Belgium. That number might seem low compared to that of this year’s Hollywood heavy-hitters, like “Barbie” ($145 million) or “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” ($250 million). Yet, together, “D’Artagnan” and “Milady” represent one of the most expensive French productions of all time. This big investment is part of a larger program from the French distributor Pathé to support tent-pole filmmaking defined by local character and resources.The two films in the franchise were completed on a budget of $78 million.Julien PanieIn early 2023, the studio released “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” a comparably expensive comedy featuring homegrown I.P. and a star-studded cast (including Cassell and Marion Cotillard). That film faltered at the box-office — and fared even worse with French critics. “The Three Musketeers,” however, has managed to draw respectable crowds in France and keep the reviewers sated, in part because it resembles the kind of action-adventure spectacle we don’t get much of nowadays.Consider the first three “Indiana Jones” movies or “The Mummy,” starring Brendan Fraser. These are old-fashioned extravaganzas, filled with hands-on stunt work and grounded in a real sense of place relative to the artificial CGI backdrops of today’s superhero movies. Intermingling palace intrigue and dry humor with bracing swordplay and horseback races against the clock, “The Three Musketeers” is moodier than these American swashbucklers, but it provides the same kind of guilty pleasure that seems to have been phased out by multiversal travel.Green, who plays the chameleonic femme fatale Milady, was delighted by the films’ practical effects and on-location shoots. The actress is no stranger to big-budget filmmaking, having starred in English-language blockbusters like “Casino Royale.” “With the green screen, it’s like theater. You have to make it up,” she said in an interview. “Here, there was no green screen. The castles, the Normandy landscapes, the extras — we were all there in the present, living the action from the inside.”There are no screen-saver visuals in “The Three Musketeers,” but it also stands apart from its counterparts in the United States for its palpable human intrigue and heavy dose of eroticism. Illicit affairs, heated love triangles and murderous tensions between past lovers propel the plot — and one of the three musketeers is casually revealed to be bisexual after a night of drink and debauchery. Heroic values like honor take on a much heavier significance when musketeers are tormented by the demons of genuinely dark histories. The eldest, played by Cassel, is framed by his enemies: After a murdered damsel is found naked in his bed, he tearfully owns up to his past abuses against women in court.Eric Ruf, left and Civil, center in a still from “The Three Musketeers: Milady.”Pathé Films/M6 FilmsIt’s passionate, borderline racy stuff for characters that tend to get the family-friendly treatment — and these movies are better for it. The narratives of both films are roughly structured around d’Artagnan’s musketeer ascendance, the sinister machinations of Cardinal Richelieu, and, in the second film, the mysteries behind Milady’s malice — but they’re also distinguished by a meandering quality that allows the characters to make love, joke around and get drunk. It’s vintage reupholstered with a sexier silhouette.Some of Pathé’s future tent-pole projects, however, sound more questionable. A lavish rendition of Dumas’s other hit novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” is in the works; as is a two-part biopic about Charles de Gaulle, the French president. Though “The Three Musketeers” was announced as a two-part film, a cliffhanger at the end of “Milady” teases a to-be-continued. Whether or not a third movie is on the table, the series’ characters will live on in two TV spinoffs currently in development: one, centered on Milady; the other, on the first Black musketeer, Hannibal (Ralph Amoussou), who appears briefly in the second film. If these expansions aren’t exactly at a Marvel Cinematic Universe-level of sprawl, the idea of a French Historical Universe provokes an uneasy déjà vu.As superhero fatigue begins to sink into Hollywood, “The Three Musketeers,” with its immersive settings and combat scenes, and its broad-minded approach to story, reminds us that there’s something to be won by going back to the basics. Personality and (close to) real-world thrills can do a lot of the heavy lifting. More

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      Twenty Years Later, ‘Irreversible’ Still Shocks

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      A look back at Gaspar Noé’s brutal told-in-reverse drama, which has been rereleased in a “Straight Cut” version.In bed with her lover, Alex (Monica Bellucci) recounts a dream: “I was in a tunnel. All red. And then the tunnel broke in half.” In any other thriller, this uncanny vision would play like a warning for things to come. But in “Irreversible,” the moment arrives toward the end, well after Alex enters the red tunnel and is brutalized by a random man — an indelible scene at the heart of Gaspar Noé’s infamous rape-revenge film, released 20 years ago this week.“Irreversible” envisions the night of Alex’s assault in reverse chronological order. First, her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), goes on a rampage through the streets of Paris in search of the culprit. Then the tunnel. Then the party that Alex will decide to leave by herself. Then the couple’s cozy, Edenlike apartment — a space that will never be the same.“By reversing the formula, ‘Irreversible’ strips away the unspoken logic that dominates these kinds of films. It forces us to question the entire relationship between rape and revenge,” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a critic and the author of numerous books on rape-revenge movies, wrote in an email.Though the film was always conceived as a story in reverse, it was shot chronologically, which allowed Noé to assemble a new version, the “Straight Cut,” that flips the order of events into linear time. “Irreversible: Straight Cut” is currently playing in theaters in the United States, and will be released, along with the original cut, on Blu-ray in July thanks to the cult distributor Altered Innocence. “In a way, the new version is both more sentimental and darker,” Noé said in a video interview, explaining that it emphasizes the pointlessness of Marcus’s vengeance-seeking.When “Irreversible” came out in 2003, Noé had already made a name for himself as a provocateur who liked his films mean and loud. His debut feature, “I Stand Alone” (1998), revolves around an incestuous horse-meat butcher with a murderous streak. Noé’s films — like “Enter the Void” (2010) or “Climax” (2019) — are descents into gruesome hells featuring extreme body horror, abrasive techno-tunes, and delirious whirligig camera movements.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.With “Irreversible,” Noé took several of his formative influences — taboo titles like “Deliverance” and “Taxi Driver,” which hinge on the male crusade for retribution — and cranked them up to match the immersive feel of reality-bending epics like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For Noé, some acts of violence are as equally capable of shattering worlds as glitches in the space-time continuum.Vincent Cassel in “Irreversible: Straight Cut.” A wild-eyed, macho intensity — the actor’s trademark — is on full display in the film.Emily De La Hosseray/Altered InnocenceSet in then-modern-day Paris, the film also starred some of the country’s biggest talents. Bellucci and Cassel, a couple at the time, were like the French equivalent of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Albert Dupontel — who plays Pierre, Alex’s bookish ex-boyfriend, witness to Marcus’s spiraling rage — was beloved for his popular comedies. Without their involvement, Noé noted, the film wouldn’t have received funding.Plus, their participation bolstered the movie’s shocks — who could imagine the steely Italian supermodel-turned-actress so graphically pulverized? Dupontel snapping and beating a man to a pulp? Cassel — well, his unhinged Marcus made sense. In “La Haine” (1996), the modern classic about police brutality in the Parisian banlieues, Cassel played a wannabe gangster, in one scene pointing a finger-gun at himself in the mirror à la Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” This same wild-eyed, macho intensity — the actor’s trademark — is on full display in “Irreversible.”“The film is testosterone-phobic. It shows men as beasts,” Noé said. Indeed, the world of “Irreversible” is one of primitive brutes. In one scene, Marcus enters Rectum, a hardcore gay club, tumbling down a crimson rabbit hole filled with leather-clad men, bondage swings and chain restraints, maniacally searching for the assailant. His madness is infectious, inciting Pierre into action, which results in an innocent man’s face turned to bloody mush. They’re in a B.D.S.M. club — a real one whose clients served as extras — so the onlookers watch in fascination and shout excitedly as the two men attack. It’s an unforgettably sinister moment, one that the director Damien Chazelle pays homage to in his latest film, “Babylon,” when Tobey Maguire’s drug-addled criminal kingpin leads a tour through a cave of depravities. “He told me he needed to meet me because he copied me!” Noé said, referring to an encounter with Chazelle in Paris.But for many people, nothing in “Irreversible” surpasses the horrors of its most talked-about scene. Shot on location in a real underpass frequented by prostitutes at the outskirts of Paris (the passage has since been demolished), the rape sequence is like the eye of a storm in a film distinguished by its frenzied visuals. “Moving the camera around would have felt like it was participating in the violence, like it was the ghost of some other complicit man,” Noé said. The rapist (Jo Prestia) puts a knife to Alex’s throat, forcing her to comply over the course of nine excruciatingly long minutes. The mostly static camera makes us hyper-aware of our passivity as spectators; but unlike the faceless figure in the distance whom we briefly see stumbling upon the rape and choosing to walk away, we’re forced to watch.No intimacy coordinators were involved on set — in the early 2000s, the profession was nonexistent — but the scene was actively rehearsed, with all the actors’ movements mapped out to create the illusion of a beating. “It was kind of like a dance,” Bellucci said over the phone, emphasizing how empowering it felt for her to be able to enact the experience from a place of total control.The cinema of toxic masculinity long precedes the current era, though discourses around gender and the various institutional reckonings with sexual violence allows us to consider films like “Taxi Driver,” and, indeed, “Irreversible,” with fresh eyes. Recent films like “The Northman” — a brutal Viking thriller keenly aware of the delusions that underpin the hero’s quest for vengeance, and Patricia Mazuy’s “Saturn Bowling,” a serial-killer movie in which femicide is treated like a sport — seem to have taken up the mantle, critiquing the patriarchy by presenting it at its most monstrous.“I couldn’t make ‘Irreversible’ today,” Noé said, adding that he believes financiers are more inclined to support movies about sexual violence by women filmmakers. Noé praised up-and-comers in the art of subversion, namely the Swedish director Isabella Ekloff. Her film “Holiday” is an unconventional rape-revenge film itself, its centerpiece also a disturbingly lengthy assault.“I grew up watching transgressive movies because I saw them as a challenge from men to see if I was tough enough,” Heller-Nicholas wrote. “Now, I’m blown away by the number of sexual assault survivors I’ve encountered who find these movies cathartic.”Rape-revenge movies like “Irreversible” show that there can be more to the depiction of gendered violence than the easy thrill of looking at brutalized female bodies. Nothing about the “Irreversible” rape scene feels exciting or titillating; and nothing about Marcus’s actions feels powerful or heroic.“Today, the new generation feels more comfortable talking about issues like rape and violence,” Bellucci said, adding that her days of acting in transgressive movies are behind her now that she’s a mother. “‘Irreversible’ is about our reality in a very painful way, and you don’t have to like it, but like the best films, you watch it and you come out a different person.” More