7/10
A rare love story
13 February 2006
Go and watch this movie if you like beautiful pictures including landscapes of high mountains, beaches and sandy moors, but also incredibly realistic sets of castles, dark forest, and the salesbrokes and wardrobes of all characters.

You really make a time travel to the middle ages, in France. People are violent,sad and severe, not very talkative.

Legends are part of domestic life and are not separate from reality, unsafety surrounds each one, and fantasy is real(for example: the nightly transformation into a boar, of a widow knight).

Inside this universe, deep characters are painted by magnificent actors: Auteuil, Melki, Emmanuelle Devos and Maurice Garrel. They evolve into 2 dramatic love stories: Guillaume de Montauban, a famous and daring former crusader, is tormented by the fire burning through his body since he was young and saved his best friend from a forest burning. This fire granted him with a formidable strength (the strength of the Dragon) as well as the nickname "the Red Dragon", fearless, heartless and banned from death. He is also tormented by a sin he committed towards his best friend and the latter's wife whom he was in love too, and slayed. Guillaume will be followed by his squire,a young orphan idealizing the Dragon, and his former best friend, who is now a wild man, becoming a boar each night and an amnesic man each morning. The second drama is the mission given by the Pope to Guillaume: chasing a young poet being the pope's favourite who escaped from him to join his bride, a chief-nun. Guillaume has an adversary in this mission, a young and brutal Knight trying to kill him.

Do not think about any action or adventure film, even if you have some in it, but rather of a drama.

I am willing to watch more movies directed by Hélène Angel.
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