Le bossu (1997, France)

An interesting and entertaining swashbuckler, with a good feel of reality, and moments of comedy.

Lagardère (Daniel Auteuil) was a foundling, but was brought up by a skilled swordsman and he acquired those skills himself. The wealthy Duke de Nevers takes a liking to him, and takes him as a companion on a journey to see Blanche, with whom he has had intimate relations, and who has just borne him an illegitimate child, which he assumes to be a boy.

The evil Comte de Gonzague will inherit if the Duke dies without a legitimate heir, and he travels to the wedding ceremony and has everyone killed, or so he believes. In fact Lagardère and the baby are the only ones left alive. Lagardère is asked by Nevers, in his dying words, to take care of the baby and to avenge his death. Lagardère decides to do so, but soon discovers that the baby is a girl, and she is wearing a locket with her name, "Aurore".

Gonzague's men are still looking for the baby, and track him down. Lagardère has helped an itinerant Italian circus troupe and they repay him by hiding the baby and throwing a puppet into a raging torrent, so that Gonzague's men think the baby is dead. Somehow the Italians get the puppet into a baby's coffin and it is buried, without arousing any suspicions.

Lagardère and the baby stay with the Italians and become performers themselves. The years roll by, and they are performing near Paris. The stage act involves Lagardère posing as a girl and Aurore (Marie Gillain) as a boy in a short play.

A gentleman is in the audience and invites them, both to a chateau in Paris, and they go at once, still in costume. A ball is in full swing, and it emerges that the man has not realised that they are crossdressed, Lagardère is going to be offered as a sexual object to someone in a back room, and the girl, here second from the right, dressed as a young man with a moustache, is offered for sex to a fat wealthy man.

It is now obvious to us why the two have been invited to this ball, and there is going to be trouble. Aurore decides to resist attempts to ravish her, and a sword duel starts with the host, Louis-Joseph, "our finest swordsman". Fortunately Lagardère has been teaching her fencing, and naturally she wins. The two escape somehow.

Gonzague and his men are not pleased at this turn of events, and the particular sequence of moves that enabled Aurore to win the duel somehow arouses their suspicions that Lagardère is alive, for it is a method used by him They exhume the coffin and discover that Aurore is not inside it -- only the puppet; and a chase is on to find Aurore and kill her, so that she cannot claim the inheritance. As Gonazague knows that Lagardère and Aurore live with the circus, finding them is not going to be difficult.

At this point we are barely halfway through the running time of this action-packed and largely believable film, which is recommended as an entertaining story. It has been released with the title On Guard, although the French title translates to "The Hunchback", a reference to a weasly clerk of Gonzague's, whom Lagardère impersonates late in the film.

The double crossdressing sequence lasts a couple of minutes.

HF March 2007

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