With films such as Dartagnan’s Daughter, Round Midnight, A Sunday In The Country and Death Watch, Bertrand Tavernier is one of the great French directors, but he comes a bit of a cropper on this 16th century period piece about sex, religion and moral inequality among the French aristocracy.

It’s 1562 and Catholics and Huguenots are killing each other in the name of religion. However, getting a late attack of conscience after butchering an entire family in a combat reflex action, the Comte de Chabannes, (Lambert Wilson) decided to give up war. Instead, meeting up with the prince of Montpensier, a nobleman he once tutored, he’s given the job of looking after his new bride, wealthy heiress Marie (Melanie Thierry) while he’s off fighting.  Advisedly so, married off by her father to someone she’d not met and doesn’t like, she’s got the hots for the handsome if volatile Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel) while Chabannes  also has to contend with the fact he quite fancies her himself.

There’s the usual amount of political manoeuvrings you expect from this sort of drama and a fair degree of sword fights and heaving bosoms, but the film’s really about the lack of power even titled women of the era enjoyed and the relationships between the men who come into her orbit. Unfortunately, while it looks great and the performances are faultless, it’s also laboriously overlong and stodgy, encumbered by huge swathes of dialogue that pretty much kills the pacing stone dead.