In 2016, director Houda Benyamina made a notable irruption into the cinema landscape by dropping out, with Divines, the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (president of the jury, Catherine Corsini), a feminine suburban film (genre or label contested by the director) which was then to cross the milestone of 300,000 admissions in France and then receive several Césars: best first film, best female hopeful for Oulaya Amamra, best supporting actress for Déborah Lukumuena, both in the casting of this new film. In almost ten years, she had not made a feature film, appearing in the direction of two episodes of the series The Eddy for Netflix, co-produced by Damien Chazelle, and co-signed by Salamon Prime, first interview with rapper Diam's since her career break. In reality, she wanted to make this feminized version of Three musketeers since 2019, a lease, but the project obviously took time to emerge. The two episodes of the Pathé adaptation, notably starring François Civil and Vincent Cassel, released in 2023, were ultra-expensive productions which attracted a large audience and awakened the flame of a French passion for Dumas, further confirmed by the Counts of Monte Cristo in 2024, of which we learned at the start of the school year that TF1 was developing a female version with Audrey Fleurot.
Here, the plot is reduced to not much, the queen's flight towards Madrid, Richelieu's soldiers on her trail and three musketeers trying to outrun them, joined by a Morisco prisoner – from the community Spanish Muslims converted to Catholicism and expelled from France during the reign of Louis XIII. Four women disguised as men, their chests wrapped in fabric, false beard hairs stuck to their faces and even a fake cock for a maximum level of verisimilitude (even if probably uncomfortable on horseback…). It is obviously interesting to see how we can bring to life the combative heroism of the characters of a classic novel when their strength or casualness which has become almost proverbial is coupled with the issue of tactical concealment of their gender identity in a world massively macho and punctuated with low blows and beatings.
A feminist and inclusive project which seeks to renew or shake up the criteria of what a costume adventure fiction can be in the beautiful landscapes of Occitania and the Mediterranean, the promise is engaging but the film is strangely atonal and harmless. Nothing, ever, seems clear-cut between the demands of a protest or critical film – and the imperatives of mainstream fiction, any more than the part of what falls within the codes of a genre (the cape film and sword) does not always seem to fit well with the messages that the film wants to convey, such as this painful scene of attempted rape where the female musketeers, regaining the upper hand, leave behind a pile of three male corpses, naked, very complacently framed as a trophy of a reversal of the balance of power. Quite in tune with what we could call a “platform aesthetic” which aims to assume intentions but without being in the least concerned with the reality of the personal substrate that can be injected into it. In fact, it is not there.
