Pierre Niney in Lavish Adaptation

Whereas Hollywood has been exploiting comedian books and YA novels as mental property for a very long time, French cinema has solely not too long ago begun to feed its wealth of nineteenth century novels into the content material machine, churning big-budget epics out of traditional books within the public area.

Final yr, a two-part model of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers hit native screens, raking in $45 million off a mixed $80 million finances for each movies. Directed by Martin Bourboulon and that includes a who’s who of Gallic stars, together with Vincent Cassel, Eva Inexperienced, Romain Duris and Louis Garrel, the Musketeers films had been marked by nonstop motion and relentless storytelling tailored for the streaming age.

Each movies had been written by the duo of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, who beforehand helmed a collection of hit comedies (Daddy or Mommy, Divorce French Type, What’s in a Title?) with a fast-paced Hollywood edge to them. They convey the identical strategy to The Rely of Monte Cristo, one other licensed Dumas traditional whose sprawling 1,500 pages the administrators handle to condense right into a watchable, if fairly unremarkable, three-hour epic full of loads of whiplash intrigue.

Like Dickens, Dumas was a commercially profitable author specializing in serial narratives, with the majority of his work printed in weekly newspapers, then launched later in e-book type. You would say that he and different main French authors from the 1800s, together with Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, who additionally exploited the weekly format, are the forefathers of the model of serial storytelling that has turn out to be a normal within the period of Netflix, with cliffhangers and twists retaining the viewer bingeing away till daybreak.

In that sense, Monte Cristo, the film, could have truly performed higher as a TV collection, a lot does it rush from one large sequence or set-piece to a different in extremely streamlined and environment friendly trend. However what was so memorable about Dumas’ novel was the way in which it appeared to stretch out time, particularly the grueling 14-year interval that its maligned hero, sailor Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney), spends imprisoned on a tiny island off of Marseilles.

That occurs on the prime of the story, after Dantès is falsely accused of aiding Napoleon — who’s been exiled from France to the island of Elba — by a trio of enemies keen to do something to do away with him, every for terribly egocentric causes: His (quickly to be former) finest good friend Fernand (Bastien Bouillon) is secretly in love with Edmond’s luminous fiancée, Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier). His shipmate, Danglars (Patrick Mille), is livid as a result of Dantès’ heroic act firstly of the movie, when he saved a lady (Adèle Simphal) from a shipwreck, leads to Edmond’s promotion to captain and Danglars’ dismissal. Then there’s the corrupt native Justice of the Peace, Villefort (Laurent Lafitte), who orchestrates the entire scheme with a view to cowl up the truth that he has a mistress.

It’s rather a lot to absorb at first, however Delaporte and de la Patellière are specialists at meting out plot factors each easily and expeditiously. The Rely of Monte Cristo is the form of film the place, after 180 minutes and plenty of, many extra plot factors, you stroll out of the theater with out having felt the time move. That’s factor should you’re in search of a reasonably entertaining, swords-and-puffy-shirts revenge story — and Dumas’ novel might be the mom of all revenge tales. However should you’re in search of one thing with extra depth and endurance, this polished adaption (budgeted at $47 million, which is big for a French movie) provides a number of conniving and scheming with out something extra significant.

Whereas Dantès is caught in solitary confinement, the place he grows a beard that will put him proper at house in Portland or Williamsburg, he befriends an Italian priest, Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), who tunnels by to his cell and winds up altering his life. Over the course of a decade — compressed into about 10 minutes — Faria offers Edmond a college-level training whereas making him an confederate in his escape plan. He additionally tells him of a treasure hidden by the Templars on an island referred to as Monte Cristo, off the coast of Italy. When the priest immediately dies, Dantès strikes into motion, breaking out of jail and enacting a revenge plot he’s been cooking up for years.

Together with his boyish options and nerdy demeanor, Niney (Yves Saint Laurent) was not maybe an apparent option to play Dumas’ brooding, vengeful protagonist, however he’s a strong sufficient actor to make Dantès convincing. The truth that he’s lined in make-up for half the film, disguising himself to trick his many victims, additionally helps the transformation, though it requires a sure suspension of disbelief to think about that devious, evil males like Fernand, Danglars or Villefort don’t instantly see by it.

You may sense the filmmakers attempting to cope with these and different extra doubtful parts of Dumas’ page-turner, and so they do their finest to tie collectively a number of characters who had been unrelated within the unique textual content. This occurs through the film’s dense and chatty second half, when the motion shifts to Paris as Edmond, now the high-rolling Rely of Monte Cristo, begins to painstakingly take out his enemies, enlisting the orphan Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei) and the illegitimate youngster Andrea (Julien de Saint Jean) to assist.  

There’s rather a lot occurring at this level, together with the truth that Edmond begins to get corrupted by his personal unquenchable thirst for vengeance, but one can be hard-pressed to give you a single scene that actually stands out. The identical can’t be mentioned for the movie’s dazzling array of units and places, which shift from beautiful Mediterranean vistas to a number of jaw-dropping villas and mansions that manufacturing designer Stéphane Taillasson (Eiffel) decks out in several nineteenth century kinds.

The backdrops go a great distance in embedding the movie in its epoch, which stretches from 1815 to 1838, or from the Restoration by the center of the July Monarchy, and the administrators deserve credit score for giving Dumas’ large work the scope it deserves. When the novel was first launched chapter-by-chapter, it should have been a bombshell for the general public, whereas Delaporte and de la Patellière’s good-looking adaptation — the twentieth made because the e-book was first dropped at the display screen in 1908 — fails to resonate in the identical method. We’ve seen so many tales like this by now that, though The Rely of Monte Cristo­ stays a real unique of the style, this dear and polished model performs like every previous revenge fantasy.