How many movies are there about Lucrezia Borgia? Certainly more than you'll ever know,not counting the numerous miniseries.This one is not the best ,but it's also far from the worst .
The action takes place in the last part of Lucrezia's life,when she was duchess of Ferrara ;her notorious brother Cesar was dead then and yet does not appear even though the sister hints at him while taking a flask of poison.At the time ,lucrezia was essentially a patron,protecting the artists.
And artists does appear in this screenplay in which an unauthorized statue plays a prominent part ;while her husband is at war,Lucrezia is wooed by many gallant men ,who praises her beauty through their poetry ,their sculptures ,or their paintings.There are real life characters such as Barbara Torelli (whose husband ,Strozzi, mysteriously died,if we are to believe the historians)and Pietro Bembi.
An unusually interesting sequence shows the making of the Renaissance heavy artillery.
In this movie,and mostly at the end of it,Lucrezia ,who was actually a pawn in her father's and brother's game ,appears as a victim of her stunning beauty ,which caused so many deaths ,and brought many ghosts around her bed .In Abel Gance's version (1934) starring Edwige Feuillère,we see the heroine in a mausoleum,wandering around the graves ;there's the obligatory bath scene in both movies, but Hinrich's scene is much less erotic and less osé than Gance's.
