Joyce Glasser reviews The Count of Monte Cristo (August 30, 2024) Cert 12A, 177 mins. In cinemas
While so many American and British two-and-a-half-hour plus action movies are instantly forgettable, Matthieu Delaporte’s and Alexandre de La Patellière’s three-hour adaptation of the 19th century historic classic, The Count of Monte Cristo, speeds by like a breath of fresh air. No annoying narration, no flashbacks or CGI and featuring a super-hero grounded by a sobering moral at odds with most films today.
Alexandre Dumas lived a life with almost as many ups and downs as his famous character, Edmond Dantès (the charismatic Pierre Niney), a man who has it all, loses it all, and could have had almost all of it again but for his Achilles heel. Along the way, the big, universal themes of love, forgiveness, justice and mercy are potently intertwined with a rich tapestry of characters who encompass all of human nature.
If you don’t know the historic background but caught the sailing and kite surfing in the bay of Marseilles during the Olympics, you are getting close. Political tensions are high as Napoleon has just left Elba for Paris, beginning his famous “100 days” before the Bourbon restoration of King Louis XVIII in July 1815.
Dantès is an upstanding nineteen-year-old first mate, heading home for the port of Marseilles, for a promotion and for his truelove, Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier). The first part of the film is like a paradise lost, echoing Napoleon Bonaparte’s. The ship’s honourable owner, Morrel, (Bruno Raffaelli) passes over a vindictive crewmate Danglars (Patrick Mille) declaring a heroic Dantès will be the next ship’s captain.
Elated, Dantès heads home to tell his proud father and Mercédès that he will have the status, and the salary for them to marry. A celebration heralds a future more promising than the new Bourbon Republic.
But Dantès’ best friend Fernand de Moncerf (Bastien Bouillon), who always intended to marry his cousin Mercédès, is caught unaware by the marriage announcement. When, by a coincidence, he meets Danglars, the two hatch a plot, aided by Marseille’s Public Prosecutor, Gérard de Villefort (Laurent Lafitte). They frame Dantès for treason ensuring that he is locked away in the grim fortress of the Chateau D’If, a just-swimmable 3 kilometres outside Marseille’s old port.
In the novel, the ship’s previous captain had charged Dantès with delivering a letter from Elba to the Parisian Bonapartist Noirtier, who is Villefort’s father. Villefort has as strong a motive for doing away with Dantès as do Danglars and Moncerf. In its only false step, the adaptation complicates matters by having Dantès save a beautiful young woman (the bearer of the Napoleonic message) from drowning. She reappears later with a dark tale of sex slavery and a child.
After fourteen years in solitary confinement, Dantès, on the verge of suicide, has given up hope. Tall, trim and striking, like a Gallic Hugh Jackman, Niney, who played the suave Yves St Laurent in the 2014 biopic and the male lead in François Ozon’s romantic WWI drama, Frantz, looks emaciated, filthy and unrecognisable under long hair and a thick beard.
Behind the thick stone walls Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), a sanguine, wise and erudite man has been carefully chiselling away for years and one day he reaches Dantès cell. The human contact is a gift from heaven, but another gift awaits Dantès as the two men join forces to dig an escape route.
To pass the time, Faria offers to teach Dantès philosophy, science, mathematics and languages, while warning him not to become consumed with revenge. When Faria fails to recover from an accident, he encourages Dantès to seek out a treasure on the Island of Monte Cristo that Faria will not live to see.
For the audience, the man we watched suffer for nearly an hour of screen time has won the lottery jackpot and the film begins to resemble a fairy tale. With the huge treasure his only friend, Dantès, impeccably dressed, sophisticated, and installed in an enormous palace outside of Paris with all the mod-cons, is well suited to entertain, and impress, the high society that now includes his enemies.
Dantès, whose disguises include an English bank clerk manager and an Italian priest – resembles the dark knight Bruce Wayne, a man living a double life whose money has earned him power and respect and whose home is a laboratory, not for bat mobiles, but for his elaborate revenge plots.
He is aided in this pursuit by his “ward”’ Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei) a young orphan Dantès adopts whose father was murdered by Moncerf. Feminists may balk, but, now a beautiful adult, Haydée is Dantes trusted companion reared on revenge to ensnare Moncerf’s and Mercédès’ handsome son Albert (Vassili Schneider).
The filmmakers have done a great job simplifying a much more complex novel while showing how Dantès drags innocent lives into his plot, some of whom rise above it and remind him of the power of love. And they never lose sight of Dumas’ moral that as Ken Kesey wrote, ‘the man who seeks who revenge digs two graves.’
