The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan (2023)

Martin Bourboulon ups the ante to 70 million euros and shoots a blockbuster on Alexandre Dumas’ masterpiece. The challenge is won in everything: cast, direction, screenplay and distribution strategy

1627. France is torn internally by the continuous clashes between the Parisian court and the Protestant citizens. War is upon us, while an increasingly weak Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) slowly loses favor with the nobles and clergy also due to the plots woven by the treacherous and Machiavellian Cardinal Rechelieu (Eric Ruf), aided by the perfidious Milady (Eva Green). Charles D’Artagnan (Francois Civil), a young man of great hopes determined to become a musketeer of the king, arrives in Paris where he meets the famous Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmai) and Aramis (Romain Duris).

It is the beginning of a series of daring adventures to save the Queen’s honour, avert the danger of war and above all save one’s skin.

The cinema has repeatedly been attracted by the masterpiece novel by Alexandre Dumas written in 1844 and made adaptations (The Three MusketeersG. Sidney, 1948), reductions for young and old (Mickey, Donald and Goofy: The Three MusketeersD. Cook, 2004) and goliardic betrayals (most recently The King’s Musketeers: The penultimate mission, G. Veronesi, 2018), now investing in one aspect of the story and now embroidering other stories and adventures on it. Dumas’ book is a evergreen or more properly an archetype of our imagination with which cinema feels the need to measure itself constantly, in the persistent and sinister attempt to bring the literary material devised by the French writer to the big screen.

Finally the young and original director Martin Bourboulonwho many already point to as the new Luc Besson and who has literally conquered critics and audiences with his eiffel (2021), who put himself on the line in order to succeed in the titanic undertaking of operating a new adaptation of the novel with a first-rate cast. It resulted a project divided into two parts: the first The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan released on April 6, the second The Three Musketeers – Miladywhich will focus on the character of the same name, will be released later this year.

Bourboulon composes a diptych that aspires to seriality on the model Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 and 2 (D. Yates, 2010, 2011) or Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame (A. and J. Russo, 2018, 2019), a format that now fits perfectly with big blockbusters. With the films mentioned, The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan it also has in common the large budget (a good 70 million euros) and the choice of the cast, full of great stars, as well as a painstaking skill in reconstructing the staging.

Bourboulon’s 1627 is not that of Nicolas Poussin or Philippe de Champaigne, of the great court literature, of Jacques Lemercier’s palaces, but that of a gloomy Paris, played on a photograph (that of Nicolas Bolduc) which combines browns on browns and dirty interiors and exteriors often illuminated by dim lighting. A filthy, muddy, ragged Paris populated by desperate people and drunkards, prostitutes and Protestant extremists

.

It is not by chance that D’Artagnan’s entry into the city is greeted by an ambush which initiates the first fight scene, the first of many shot with extreme skill. Bourboulon conducts sparingly, following now Porthos then Aramis then Athos as they duel, shoot, kick and punch, making use of long shots that are never interrupted by the montage cut; which homogenizes the fight scenes as if they were choreographed. The MDP follows the breathtaking adventures of the three protagonists like in a dance, eager to capture their exploits, so eager to film what is happening that she never wants to be interrupted by editing.

It is as if MDP wants to hold together a world that is actually crumbling due to internal conflicts, as Gianni Canova suggested in his review, desperately trying never to interrupt the flow of images.

Between intrigues and passions, duels and mortal challenges, scams and revenge, the film brings back the swashbuckling genre reinterpreted in a modern key in the light of the most recent conquests of the American blockbuster, without however wanting to borrow its syntax.

In fact, the director pursues his own personal vision of cinema which in his hands once again becomes a “place of possible expressions” – to use an expression dear to Fabrizio Cruciani -, an art capable of bewitching for its story-telling claim, a discourse that brings what is told to what is seen contagious in his eagerness for adventures and in his commitment, at times vintage, to keep the viewer glued to his seat with “simple but true emotions” (Gianni Canova) as only great cinema can give.

You would never want to see the hopes of D’Artagnan end, the existential torments of Athos, the horse chases, the loves of Queen Anne (a Vicky Krieps as delicate as a porcelain doll) and the Duke of Backingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) , but above all you would never stop being enthusiastic about yet another scam of the infamous, evil and diabolical Milady, a Eve Green

who embodies one of the greatest antagonists of the European novel thanks to her dark charm and steely gaze.

And when in the end everything seems apparently resolved and instead what was believed to be pacified was only a ploy of fate to make time flow, right before overwhelming the lives of characters put into play, it really feels like reading some of the most epic chapters written by Dumas.

Stay in the room for the post-credit scene and above all write down the release date of the second part to find out what will become of D’Artagnan and Constance Bonaci (Lyna Khoudri) and above all to find out what the evil Milady is up to against our loved ones Musketeers.