Beautifully filmed at the original locations. Fanny Ardant (now aged 63) should portray a 34-old Zarina Alexandra, but makeup too, doesn’t help. Depardieu is cheap and even more helpless. That may come from a poor script and an uninspiring direction. With all the recent historical information about the whole affair and its real political backgrounds, a more understandable and psychologically credible plot could have been done.

Incidentally, Felix Yussupov (Rasputin’s murderer) was a homosexual and not a transvestite; he did not seduce Rasputin dressed up as a woman. Compared to earlier Rasputin movies, one could even prefer Uli Edel’s of 1996 with Alan Rickman. The absolutely best Rasputin movie, however, is Elem Klimov’s “Agoniya” from 1981, starring an unforgettable Alexei Petrenko.