Why the bet The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan is successful (review)
Martin Bourboulon and screenwriters Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière reactivate the idea of literate and unifying entertainment. A mission accomplished with panache, despite the weight of the specifications. To be seen this evening in clear on M6.
No football this evening, on M6. For the first time in a month, the 2026 World Cup is on hold and the private channel is taking the opportunity to broadcast one of the biggest French successes of recent years in unencrypted form for the first time.
Can we be resurrected d’Artagnan ? How can we bring it back to life, after around fifty adaptations of Alexandre Dumas’ novel for the cinema? This is the question posed very explicitly by the opening sequence of these Three Musketeers vintage 2023, in which – we allow ourselves a little spoiler – the intrepid Gascon, played by François Civilemerges from a tomb where he had been buried a little too hastily… Manner for the director Martin Bourboulon and the screenwriters Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, not to announce a twilight rereading of the myth, but to indicate that it is a question of dusting it off, of giving it a new lease of life. The issue is not only aesthetic or heritage: it is also industrial, the film carrying on its shoulders the responsibility of reinventing nothing less than the idea of a “quality” French popular cinema, literate and entertaining, unifying and erudite. Old refrain, which has become deafening in the age of competition from Marvel and streaming.
The latest generation to tackle the problem, led by Christophe Gans, had attempted a postmodern approach, mixing the Lagarde and Michard heritage with a whole (counter-)culture of comics, psyche, spaghetti, B series… Vincent Cassel, leading figure of this school (from the Pact of the Wolves to The Emperor of Paris), and magnificent here in tired Athos, is responsible for passing the baton to Bourboulon. This has opted for a style, let’s say, neo-classical: it is a question of claiming the influence of the great productions of Claude Berri of the 80s and 90s by investing it with borrowings, thematic or formal, from the great contemporary American auteur cinema, from Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood to Nolan’s Batman Begins.
As such, the meeting between d’Artagnan and the three musketeers, a fight where the four men get to know each other, reveal their respective characters while gaily skewering the cardinal’s guards, serves as a manifesto. This sequence shot looking towards The Revenant (well, another story of resurrection), sets the tone of the film: guided by action, feet in the mud, very choreographed, proud of its know-how and its impeccable artistic direction, seeking to rediscover the historical weight of Dumas’s writings. This is cinema made by people who clearly take as much pleasure in admiring a beautiful, shiny US blockbuster on Saturday evening as in spending Sunday in the library, their noses in Richelieu’s correspondence.
The ecumenical desire of the film finds a strange echo in the performance of the actors, who all interpret their score according to very different tones – without this harming the overall coherence. D’Artagnan and Constance Bonacieux (Lyna Khoudri) flirt as if they were in a bar on the Canal Saint-Martin; Eva Greenin Milady comic book, seems to come from a Tim Burton; Pio Marmaï the relaxed cheek, like Klapisch; Romain Duris chose the option Jack Sparrow, dandy rock; And Louis Garrel triumphs as a childish Louis XIII, blushing with his own accents of authority.
The only real limit of the company being that by dint of wanting to respect its enormous specifications – to compete with the Americans while celebrating heritage, to return to the essence of Dumas while modernizing it, etc. – the film, intense, serious, “concerned”, sometimes almost professorial, forgets a little of the lightness, the carefreeness, the notion of pure pleasure, which we have associated since childhood with this story – especially in a third act which seems rushed, shoehorned in so as not to allow the whole thing to exceed two hours. It will be in the second part – Miladyexpected on December 13 – to deliver the final blow. But the blade is already sharp.
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan. By Martin Bourboulon. With François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris… Duration 2h01.
