movie: Cartouche

[meganbmoore]

I just watched Cartouche, a 1960s French swashbuckler about an 18th century bandit, Louis Dominique Bourguignon. Dominique himself was real, but I suspect the story was highly fictionalized. (I know little about the real guy.)

For the most part, I thought it was pretty fun, aside from an annoying love triangle that sometimes made it hard for me to like Dominique (Also, were we really supposed to believe that a guy who had Venus would have that many problems making up his mind?  I also found his interest in the other woman so hard to buy into even apart from Venus that I genuinely thought he was faking it and it was some plot for parts of the movie.) and then I got to the end, which was just as bad as I was warned.

Because it was like the whole movie was the angsty backstory of how the vengeful bandit became vengeful when the girlfriend he didn’t appreciate enough got fridged because his wandering pants got him in trouble?

And it didn’t help that the villain’s wife was blonde and virtuous and off limits, and Venus was a gypsy bandit who claims to have had multiple lovers before Dominique. I mean, my personal experiences in fiction have been more along the lines of “blondes are dead/evil/slutty, and brunettes/redheads are amazing and perfect and The Heroine and so much better (unless the blonde is named Buffy),” but I’m well aware of the traditional light/dark heroine dichotomy, and sometimes it seriously kicks me in the face.

Sigh.

Is Le Bossu, a 90s swashbuckler by the same director, any good?