‘The Three Musketeers’ and the Joy of Old-School Blockbusters
Beatrice Loayza www.nytimes.com beatrice-loayza
With its practical effects and broad-minded approach to story, the French franchise revives the pleasures of earlier movie spectacles, but with a Gallic twist.
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“The Three Musketeers” is to France what Mickey Mouse is to America — a cultural force with a lock on the country’s imagination. The 19th-century cloak-and-dagger tale, written by Alexandre Dumas, has lived countless lives onstage and onscreen, with stars, including Charlie Sheen, Charlton Heston, Milla Jovovich and even Barbie, resurrecting the classic tale of the Kings guard. It’s as iconically French as the Eiffel Tower, yet, until recently, it had been more than 60 years since the last French movie adaptation.

Enter “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” and “Milady,” a gritty two-film franchise by the director Martin Bourboulon that seeks to reclaim this legacy in a major way.

“Milady,” the second installment, was released in European theaters earlier this month; “D’Artagnan” played in Europe last spring and is currently available in the United States on demand.

Boasting a cast of French national treasures (like Louis Garrel and Romain Duris) and stars with global appeal (like Vincent Cassel, Eva Green and Vicky Krieps), these twin French-language productions were conceived as offensives against the tyranny of Hollywood movies that continue to dominate the French box office. At the end of 2022, not a single French-language production made it onto the list of the year’s top 10 highest-grossing films, signaling a crisis for a country whose cinematic heritage is a point of national pride.

“In France, we have the talent, stories, and technicians to make blockbusters that can compete against American offerings,” Bourboulon said. “Big movies shouldn’t be made only by American studios, so we were inspired to take them on.”

Shot back-to-back, the two films were completed on a budget of $78 million, financed by partners in France, Germany, Spain and Belgium. That number might seem low compared to that of this year’s Hollywood heavy-hitters, like “Barbie” ($145 million) or “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” ($250 million). Yet, together, “D’Artagnan” and “Milady” represent one of the most expensive French productions of all time. This big investment is part of a larger program from the French distributor Pathé to support tent-pole filmmaking defined by local character and resources.

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