Angélique and the King

While the film's gender politics are suspect — Angélique remains admirably crafty and composed throughout, but there's something distasteful about the way these movies seem to excuse (if not endorse) the cloddish, sexually menacing behavior of the men around her — it's undeniably exciting to see a female protagonist in this environment refusing to be cowed by threats of violence and violation, or to even once go weepy with self-pity. The filmmakers don't forget that it was tough to be a woman at the end of the 18th century, but they don't make her a perennial victim, either.

Racial attitudes, too, are a mite uncomfortable. Dark-skinned characters hung around the margins of the first film like set dressing, and Peyrac complained pointedly that his hideous facial scar was etched by an unnamed Persian. This time around, that isolated reference to Arab cruelty is replaced by the spectacular callousness of Bachtiary-Bey, who casually orders the torture of bodyguards and servant girls and has a fixation on what he sees as the western illusion of free will. That last moment is theologically intriguing, but it's used to further sketch the Persian as a monstrous cartoon. I found myself wondering how closely the character hewed to the one established in the 1959 source novel, and whether his film portrayal was influenced by anti-Arab sentiment surrounding the wave of North African immigrants entering France in the 1960s.

Beyond all that, the film is a blast, driven as much by sex and skullduggery as by Angélique's lavish assortment of corsets and gowns. There may not be much to it as cinema — it's definitely in the tradition of middlebrow populism, leaning toward romance-novel silliness — but it's one heck of a soap opera.

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