Series writers kneel before the queens.
After Tsarina Catherine the Great (
The Great
), Elizabeth I (
Becoming Elizabeth)
and while waiting for Marie-Antoinette to appear soon on Canal+, it's Catherine de Medici's turn to see her posterity regilded on Starzplay with
The Serpent Queen
.
An American vision of the queen of the religious wars of Valois very rock.
Neither a history buff nor an academic biopic, screenwriter Justin Haythe (
Les Noces rebelles
) concocts eight episodes somewhere between black comedy and sitcom
"to pay homage to a modern sovereign who, despite herself, inspired the myths of the poisoned apple and magic mirrors
.
To discover
TV program: Find tonight's TV program
"World of Fools and Drunks"
Justin Haythe starts from the black legend of Catherine, that of the practitioner of the occult arts, the widow who pulls the strings in the shadows, immortalized in Alexandre Dumas' novel
La Reine Margot
.
The series opens with a Catherine regent of the young Charles IX.
She has the carnivorous smile of Samantha Morton
(Minority Report
) and orders a servant to keep her company.
She then retraces her painful arrival at the Court of France, at the age of 15.
An embedded story where Morton fades behind the amazing Liv Hill (
The Little Stranger
).
“Sold” to France by her pope uncle (Charles Dance), the teenager has no beauty but fortune and wit.
A survival instinct honed early to escape Florence's sack.
“To understand why she was so ruthless, you have to know what she went through.
Would we have done better in his place?
,
says Justin Haythe.
Commoner, she rises above the lot, she embodies a social rise that speaks to us.
Like his heartache: this non-reciprocal passion dedicated to the sullen Henry II”.
Pragmatic, this Catherine addresses the camera, as in Greek tragedies or Shakespeare, insists Justin Haythe.
Between a ribald François I, a rival, Diane de Poitiers, insolent (Ludivine Sagnier burlesque and voluptuous) and courtiers quick to execute peasants, the absurdity is constant.
"I didn't invent anything, it was a world of crazy people and drunkards
," pleads the screenwriter.
The metamorphosis of its ingenuous heroine into a cynical and manipulative who seeks to trap her daughter-in-law, the cultured Mary Stuart, to send her back to Scotland is the masterful demonstration of this.
While waiting for Saint-Barthélemy, the high point of a second season.