The Catholic Margot has been married, early in the film, to the feckless Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), the Protestant who would become Henri IV. But they are in a hissing match before they're fairly down the aisle, and there's no question of them sleeping with one another; their union is for the purpose of ending a religious war. Catherine de Medici meanwhile plays politics, and favorites, with her three sons, who mope about while Margot slips aside with la Mole (Vincent Perez), the lover she has found in the streets.

The film proceeds by way of stabbings, fits, rapes, orgies, lies, betrayals and adulteries to its set piece, the St.

Bartholomew's Day Massacre, at which some 50,000 Protestants were murdered and dumped into mass graves. These scenes are shot with an awesome technical competence, but go on much too long (even after trims since Cannes) and lose their point since we know few of the characters being murdered.

Much more effective is a quiet subplot involving a poisoned book; its reader, licking his finger to turn the pages, will eventually kill himself. When the wrong person picks up the book, the result is the best double-take in the movie, and certainly the best deathbed speech: "I've read too much. Understand?" Isabelle Adjani is one of the more remarkable actresses of her time, and throws herself into roles like this with courageous abandon. Remember for example "Camille Claudel" (1989), based on the life of the woman sculptor who was the mistress of Rodin, but whose talent was shrugged aside because of her sex, and who ended up in an asylum. Adjani in that film, scrabbling with her bare hands in a cold field for the clay to make her sculptures, had a passion similar to Adjani in "Queen Margot," living in a jungle of human duplicity. The difference is, in the earlier film we cared about her, and what was happening to her. "Queen Margot" is like elaborate illustrations for a book we haven't read.

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