DVD Review: HENRY OF NAVARRE Is A Quietly Quite Impressive Diversion
Jo Baier's historical biopic canters onto Blu-ray and DVD...
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History is so hot right now. HBO's Rome showed everyone the way, before the floodgates opened and one-time-unmarketable properties like Spartacus: Blood & Sand became the norm, with their blood, raunch and sandals approach to history. Couple that with the reinvigorated fascination with all things regal, and it looks like Jo Baier's period biopic Henry of Navarre had a lot of things going for it in the current market. But can it do what few French historical films have done before it and make a big splash on Blu-ray and DVD? The film (also known by its French name Henri 4) charts the life of Protestant royal Henry of Navarre from his early life on the fields of battle of a religious war-torn France, through his married life, and his attempts to resist assassination by the hand of pantomimey villainess and eventually become the country's eventually beloved monarch King Henri IV (hence the French title). The film starts in horribly cliched fashion with a visit from Nostradamus to Henry as a child, confirming that the young royal will be a big deal in future - it's not the narrative aspects that are cliched so much as the way the scene is shot and framed by a pregnant, soaring score, then moves to the battlefields, where Henry cuts his teeth as a famed warrior, before his marriage into the court of Catherine de Medici and subsequent trials and attempts on his life. The acting is all fairly impressive, though some occasionally verges on pantomimey territory - but then the script does call for some gleeful abandon in places, which Ulrich Noethen seems to particularly take advantage of as King Charles IX, who is little more than a manipulated, blood-sweating tool of his villainess mother - played with enjoyable menace by Hanelore Hoger. Hoger has enough poise and enough malevolence to convince of her grand puppet-master role, but really few of the characters are anything other than slightly reductive caricatures, each defined somewhat clumsily by one characteristic above all - Charles by his hysterical rage, Hoger by her callous and cold calculation, Henry's wife Marguerite by her sexuality - to the point where they are little but diverting ornaments in the main story. That main story is carried by Henry himself, played in the most part by Julien Boisselier who is charismatic and engaging enough, convincing both of his more barbaric side and his naive inner nature - his is after all a character defined by that dichotomy, and crucially Boisselier's performance carries that weight well. Two and a half hours may feel like a long time, but it's worth remembering that the film was destined at one point to be two longer TV movies, even if that is of little help when the attention starts to wane late on during the slower passages. But credit where credit is due, rather than the apparently hastily edited cinematic version of Carlos (which meshed three episodes together), the edit here is far more accomplished, and while the original intention is clear in certain scenes, it does work as an extended theatrical cut.