The Count Of Monte Cristo

Dantès Pique

The Count Of Monte Cristo
aka Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
France/Belgium 2024
Directed by Alexandre de La Patellière
& Matthieu Delaporte
Pathe Blu Ray Zone B

After the recent reworkings of The Three Musketeers (reviewed by me here and here), the French have turned their attention to adapting Alexandre Dumas’ classic tale of revenge, The Count Of Monte Cristo and, it has to be said, I suspect whether you will enjoy this or not would depend on your familiarity with the original work and any of the numerous movie and TV adaptations over the last century or more.

For myself, I quite liked the film (to a point) because I’m one of those few people left alive who still hasn’t got around to reading the original novel but, my dad has always been quite hard on what previous media incarnations have been like in terms of their faithless attempts to bring the story to moving image. Judging by the alternative, constant tuts and his yellings at the screen throughout the almost three hour running time of this version, I can testify that this latest attempt has played hard and fast with the original story, adding stuff and demolishing other important stuff to make it a quite frustrating experience for the familiar onlooker.

It was the most expensive production in France for the end of last year and similarly it was one of the official selections to be sent for Oscar consideration, so one wonders if anyone in production had even ever read the original work. And every now and then, my father would interject the main narrative with cries of, “well there goes another three chapters full they’ve completely cut out.”. So yeah, if you are into Dumas then, maybe don’t look at this version.

For myself, with my brazen unfamiliarity with the original text, I found it quite watchable and even quite gripping... there were some challenges inherent in the production for me too, though.

The film stars Pierre Niney as Edmund Dantès, the titular count, who after being torn from the arms of his lover Mercedes (played by Anaïs Demoustier, who was so good in Daaaaaali!, reviewed here) at their wedding, he’s falsely accused and condemned to stay at the famous French prison fortress, the Château d'If. However, he escapes after 14 years and, with the Knights Templar treasure falling into his hands, he goes on to research, train and extract a slow vengeance on the people who placed him in that situation... 20 years after his original incarceration.

The acting in this is all good but there are definitely some issues with the way things have been portrayed. In the original, Dantès didn’t really have to disguise himself much because the 14 years hard time and 6 years additional preparation for his revenge had aged him, making him look quite different if you are not expecting to see him (or, indeed, believed him perished). In this version, however (and quite strangely), none of the actors seemed to have aged in any significant way in that 20 year gap. They all look more or less exactly the same, for some reason. So what the writers do here, somewhat bizarrely, is give his character ‘realistic masks’ which change his face somehow completely and are the low tech equivalent of the ones used by Tom Cruise and his pals in the Mission: Impossible franchise of movies. The fact that the high tech ones would never, in real life, be able to successfully work, let alone with the technology used when this film is set... well... it’s where the film jumps into the ‘totally preposterous’ zone, I would say.

The film looks really good though. To paraphrase a very good friend of mine (thanks, Madame K), the film ‘looks like an extended perfume advert’ devoted to the warm rich, colourful cinematography devoted to a doomed love (or, you know, an overly expensive perfume... which they all are because perfume should only cost a fiver tops. Right? Bloody Chanel.). So, yeah, really nice to look at but, somehow giving an air of shallow, retro pop culture at the same time. It’s also has a really brilliant score by Jérôme Rebotier which, sadly and mind bogglingly, is not available on a proper CD at time of writing (digital downloads be damned to the hell in which they were invented).  

The film is not exactly an action epic either (like the previous versions of the Musketeer movies). It’s very light on action at all, it has to be said but the story, what remains of it, is quite gripping and I enjoyed some of the cross cutting between rehearsal and execution of ‘the sting’ of various components of Dantès’ revenge, I have to say. So there it is... a new adaptation of The Count Of Monte Cristo but especially for ‘Dumas virgins’ I would say. Great as an intriguing drama but, at the cost of leaving the corpse of Dumas spinning eerily in his grave like a whirlygig, it has to be said.