Classy French costume adventure very much in the Cartouche mode (from the same director, Philippe de Broca), with an enchantingly myth-like plotline, plenty of swordplay, literate dialogue, tasteful color, a fine leading man in Daniel Auteuil, but not, alas, a musical score by Cartouche's Georges Delerue. (Big swells, instead, of the same Mascagni intermezzo that Scorsese used in Raging Bull.) The discovery of the slaughtered wedding guests is a breath-stoppingly spooky scene, capped off with the poetic shock effect of a corpse whose face is masked beneath dripped and hardened candlewax. De Broca still knows a thing or two about filmmaking after forty years of it. Fabrice Luchini, Vincent Perez, Marie Gillain, Philippe Noiret. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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