The Three Musketeers: Part II – Milady — Martin Bourboulon

A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with Karl Marx’s famed specter of communism, have come together not to exorcise but embrace this specter in a warm hug and to give it a sweet kiss. The mutual seduction between the centers of Western film production and the commercial industry wraps with a business handshake assuring a diversification of assets and a strong general ROI. Most importantly, after the bedded ritual concludes, the filmmaking centers promise one thing and one thing only: an endless supply of “entertaining” content. In this, The Three Musketeers: Part II – Milady, the consumerist title of the second entry in French director Martin Bourboulon’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ ubiquitous text, is not unique. Nor will any of the series’ two television spin-offs with Disney be anything unique or exceptional in the era of commercialized art.

In 1967, the Christian author and publisher Charles E. Hummel coined the phrase “tyranny of the urgent” to describe the way modern life — through the institutions of capitalism and imperialism, though he likely wouldn’t admit that — re-orients our schedules and priorities to be perpetually engaged in the maintenant. The new The Three Musketeers series responds to Hummel’s aphorism of social criticism with a “isn’t that fucking great?” It’s not great. Milady, much like Part I – D’Artagnan, loots its own potential of bringing Dumas to the present with an uninspired vision of the book as corporate property. And no, the bisexual Porthos (Pio Marmaï) is not the problem.

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