Let’s talk
about costume design and painting, shall we?
One of my
favorite Oscar oddities is the strange propensity of the Costume branch to give
out nominations to films completely off the Oscar radar. When this nomination
is graced upon a foreign language film my joy is redoubled, and one of the
prime examples for such an occurrence is this week’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot
subject, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot, a dramatization of Alexandre Dumas’
homonymous novel about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, where
thousands of Huguenots where murdered by Catholics in a wave of mob violence.
I mention
the costumes for they were a point of confusion for me the first time I watched
the film, many years ago. In that time, I already knew of the massacre and was
fascinated by its historical significance, and was obviously eager to watch such
a high profile film about it. I was also already greatly interested in costume
design and fashion history, and, by consequence, when faced with Chéreau’s film
and Moidele Bickel’s costumes I was astonished to see the complete disregard
for any sort of historical reality. With its mixture of pseudo Renaissance
styles plus a heavy dose of baroque-ish elements, the entire thing is closer to
fantasy than period.
Costume wise, history flavored fantasy
You must
understand that, when I started to get interested in such things, I was quite
limited in my points of view. If a film was ostensibly about history, I
expected a level of accuracy and recreation, only in a more loose and fictional
narrative would I accept the stylizations that, for example, featured in the world
of geniuses like Eiko Ishioka. Though I still believed in such ridiculous
binary ideas of historical fidelity in costume design, I was immensely
fascinated with Bickel’s work and the strange atmosphere it conjured.
As I
previously mentioned, the costumes of La Reine Margot freely mix elements of
both Baroque, Renaissance and even fantasy fashion, creating a strange hybrid
where, curiously, simplicity and symbolic color are the main elements of visual
impact. On a simplistic way, one can justify such choices by pointing out how
this film is actually based in a romantic reimagining of the historical events,
and it’s therefore expected that the design give it a sexy contemporary
feeling. The genius in Bickel’s work though, isn’t in the way she catered her
designs and, by consequence, the film’s aesthetic to modern sensibilities, but
rather created something that is closer to a Baroque, Catholic Counter Reform
style.
A dawn lit, cinematographic Caravaggio
To
understand what I’m trying to say, think not of the opulent 17th
century churches with altars covered in elaborate golden constructions where
the horror of the empty had the consequence of everything being filled with excruciating
and dramatic details. Instead, try to picture the paintings of such masters as
Caravaggio, Gentileschi and de la Tour, where the carnal, the violent and the
shadowy darkness were presented hand-in-hand with Catholic spirituality. Images
of striking lighting contrasts, where the sacred seemed to exist in constant
communion with the profane, almost feeding from it to gain obscene power and
influence.
A dark and ominously bloody version of the catholic imagetic of the Virgin Mary
That same
relationship of sacred and profane imagery permeates through La Reine Margot and
its costumes, which are, along with the cinematography and the barren set
design, inexorably responsible for turning this film in what seems like a
Baroque painterly nightmare. A sexy nightmare at that, for there are few period
films that so efficiently inject a searing carnality into their narrative proceedings,
or that so violently create visual and thematic connections between desire and
death. A hedonistic procession through a palace corridor is later reinterpreted
as a desperate run for survival through a building filled, not with steamy
sexual activity, but huddles of naked corpses. A woman dresses in rich, but
simple, bright colored clothing walks through the streets of Paris in search of
a lover in one scene, while later, she follows the same path, but in her way
stand not potential objects of pleasure, but the remains of monstrous carnage
and her costume has changed from rich blue to a dark, sanguine red.
Such
costume evolutions are central to the visual discourse of La Reine Margot,
whose clothing is the epitome of such ideas I’ve expressed about viscerally and
sacred beauty. Unencumbered by the limitations of historical recreation, Bickel
created a wardrobe where the cotton damasks are almost constantly infused with
either perspiration or blood. Through her designs you can both get the idea of
a painting come to life and the sensorial reality of such a world, with its
sweltering heat and uncomfortable court rituals. Just by looking at these
moving tableaux you can practically smell the sweat, blood and cum.
I’m afraid
I might have got a little bit lost in my argumentation, so maybe it’s time to
stop with my futile explanations and just present my best shot.
