Thankfully, Zeitoun and his Belgian co-screenwriter, Philippe Blasband, working from a story summary by the novelists’ daughter, Nadia Golon, manage to do just that, and Arnezeder and Lanvin imbue their characters with both their own eccentricities and a pleasing sense of complicity. In order for the film to work, the relationship between the unlikely duo, which slowly evolves into respect and then love, has to be believable and at the same time not undermine Angelique’s fierce individuality. In a nice twist, Peyrac may be ugly and older - even a lot older than in the book in this adaptation - but he’s also an expert at understanding people and Angelique is impressed when he doesn’t freak out when she provocatively shows up for their wedding wearing pants. But her father, her uncle ( Miguel Herz-Kestranek) and her insidious cousin, Philippe ( Tomer Sisley), “save” her and manage to deliver her to Peyrac. Initially, Angelique rebels and tries to make love to the handsome Nicolas ( Mathieu Kassovitz) so that she’ll be defiled and thus won’t have to marry a man she doesn’t know. The riches of Peyrac, who had an accident in his youth and has a huge scar on his face and a limp as result, stem from a gold mining operation that utilizes a new technique to extract the precious metal, though his adversaries claim he’s a sorcerer who can turn things into gold.
In the mid-1600s France, Angelique (Arnezeder) is married by her practically penniless aristocratic father ( Matthieu Boujenah) to the Count of Peyrac, a man whose fortune is so great, people whisper he’s practically as rich as the Sun King himself, Louis XIV ( David Kross), who’s still in his early 20s. There’s a nostalgia factor at work for French audiences, who’ll remember the original films or have since caught up via countless re-runs, that won’t offer quite the same draw abroad, though the film has already been sold to many European territories including Germany, much of Eastern Europe and Russia.
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