French <i> Auteur </i> Takes a Cut From Hollywood Editors : Films: Patrice Chereau’s ‘Queen Margot’ was long and turgid. But 190 snips later, the movie is ready for the American market.
PARIS — To put it mildly, the French film industry does not like taking lessons from Hollywood, so there was much spluttering when it was learned that the Americans had been allowed to wield their scissors on “La Reine Margot.†(“Queen Margot†opened last week in Los Angeles.) The film was the year’s Gallic flagship, which means it conformed to the profile of being a very long, very expensive, over-wrought epic of the costume variety starring Gerard Depardieu or Isabelle Adjani or preferably both.
The official film carries the flag at Cannes; patriotic duty drives the citizens to see it and the critics have the task of struggling to find ways to avoid the word boring.
When it came out in the spring of this year, “La Reine Margot,†a 17-million-pound melodrama of lust, blood and poison starring Adjani, was so turgid that it made “Germinal,†the gruesome coal-mine opera of last year, look like a romantic comedy. In addition, it lasts nearly three hours.
Unbound by political correctness, Variety damned it at Cannes with a simple headline: “Bloody Margot Fails to Fascinate.â€
Since “Margot†has lost money and the heavily subsidized French industry is desperate to export, Claude Berri, the producer, accepted the demand by Miramax, the American distributors, for a total re-edit. American screenings had simply put the audience to sleep.
“How dare they!†was the first reaction among the auteurs of the Left Bank, a breed that does not even let its own producers touch its offspring.
But the result of the 190 cuts and added music has been so impressive that Berri and Patrice Chereau, the director, have swallowed their pride and are now singing the praises of Yankee know-how.
“There is no shame in listening to the Americans,†Chereau said. “It is true they push hard . . . But their cinema works and we have things to learn from them.â€
Even the notoriously difficult Adjani, who makes a film only every few years, is full of praise, saying that “Margot†is now “much more romantic.†To crown it all, the slimmed-down Margot is about to be relaunched on the French public.
In America, it has the extremely rare task of competing with another French film, Luc Besson’s “The Professional.â€
However, Jacques Toubon, the Gaullist culture minister, is not crowing over Besson’s hit because the film is not only made in English and set in New York, but it is also a gore-sodden tale of serial murder that makes “Natural Born Killers†look like “Howards End.â€
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