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\u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d is to France what Mickey Mouse is to America \u2014 a cultural force with a lock on the country\u2019s 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<\/a> resurrecting the classic tale of the Kings guard. It\u2019s as iconically French as the Eiffel Tower, yet, until recently, it had been more than 60 years since the last French movie adaptation.<\/p>\n Enter \u201cThe Three Musketeers: D\u2019Artagnan\u201d and \u201cMilady,\u201d a gritty two-film franchise by the director Martin Bourboulon that seeks to reclaim this legacy in a major way.<\/p>\n \u201cMilady,\u201d the second installment, was released in European theaters earlier this month; \u201cD\u2019Artagnan\u201d played in Europe last spring and is currently available in the United States on demand.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s top 10 highest-grossing films<\/a>, signaling a crisis for a country whose cinematic heritage is a point of national pride.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn France, we have the talent, stories, and technicians to make blockbusters that can compete against American offerings,\u201d Bourboulon said. \u201cBig movies shouldn\u2019t be made only by American studios, so we were inspired to take them on.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Hollywood heavy-hitters, like \u201cBarbie<\/a>\u201d ($145 million) or \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3<\/a>\u201d ($250 million). Yet, together, \u201cD\u2019Artagnan\u201d and \u201cMilady\u201d represent one of the most expensive French productions of all time. This big investment is part of a larger program from the French distributor Path\u00e9 to support tent-pole filmmaking defined by local character and resources.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In early 2023, the studio released \u201cAsterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,\u201d a comparably expensive comedy featuring homegrown I.P. and a star-studded cast (including Cassell and Marion Cotillard). That film faltered at the box-office \u2014 and fared even worse with French critics. \u201cThe Three Musketeers,\u201d however, has managed to draw respectable crowds in France and keep the reviewers sated, in part because it resembles the kind of action-adventure spectacle we don\u2019t get much of nowadays.<\/p>\n Consider the first three \u201cIndiana Jones\u201d movies or \u201cThe Mummy,\u201d starring Brendan Fraser. These are old-fashioned extravaganzas, filled with hands-on stunt work and grounded in a real sense of place relative to the artificial CGI backdrops of today\u2019s superhero movies. Intermingling palace intrigue and dry humor with bracing swordplay and horseback races against the clock, \u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d is moodier than these American swashbucklers, but it provides the same kind of guilty pleasure that seems to have been phased out by multiversal travel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Green, who plays the chameleonic femme fatale Milady, was delighted by the films\u2019 practical effects and on-location shoots. The actress is no stranger to big-budget filmmaking, having starred in English-language blockbusters like \u201cCasino Royale<\/a>.\u201d \u201cWith the green screen, it\u2019s like theater. You have to make it up,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cHere, there was no green screen. The castles, the Normandy landscapes, the extras \u2014 we were all there in the present, living the action from the inside.\u201d<\/p>\n There are no screen-saver visuals in \u201cThe Three Musketeers,\u201d but it also stands apart from its counterparts in the United States for its palpable human intrigue and heavy dose of eroticism. Illicit affairs, heated love triangles and murderous tensions between past lovers propel the plot \u2014 and one of the three musketeers is casually revealed to be bisexual after a night of drink and debauchery. Heroic values like honor take on a much heavier significance when musketeers are tormented by the demons of genuinely dark histories. The eldest, played by Cassel, is framed by his enemies: After a murdered damsel is found naked in his bed, he tearfully owns up to his past abuses against women in court.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s passionate, borderline racy stuff for characters that tend to get the family-friendly treatment \u2014 and these movies are better for it. The narratives of both films are roughly structured around d\u2019Artagnan\u2019s musketeer ascendance, the sinister machinations of Cardinal Richelieu, and, in the second film, the mysteries behind Milady\u2019s malice \u2014 but they\u2019re also distinguished by a meandering quality that allows the characters to make love, joke around and get drunk. It\u2019s vintage reupholstered with a sexier silhouette.<\/p>\n Some of Path\u00e9\u2019s future tent-pole projects, however, sound more questionable. A lavish rendition of Dumas\u2019s other hit novel \u201cThe Count of Monte Cristo\u201d is in the works; as is a two-part biopic about Charles de Gaulle, the French president. Though \u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d was announced as a two-part film, a cliffhanger at the end of \u201cMilady\u201d teases a to-be-continued. Whether or not a third movie is on the table, the series\u2019 characters will live on in two TV spinoffs currently in development: one, centered on Milady; the other, on the first Black musketeer, Hannibal (Ralph Amoussou), who appears briefly in the second film. If these expansions aren\u2019t exactly at a Marvel Cinematic Universe-level of sprawl, the idea of a French Historical Universe provokes an uneasy d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.<\/p>\n