La Belle Helene (1995)

Outside the Temple of Jupiter.

The Spartans are preparing to celebrate the feast of Adonis, but the offerings are meager and so, say the ladies, are their love lives. Queen Helen, married to the mild and tolerant King Menelaus, is fascinated by the story of Paris, the shepherd who gave the golden apple to Venus to win the love of “the most beautiful woman in the world”
– after all, says Helen, isn’t she that woman? When Paris arrives (he is actually a Prince of Troy in disguise) she is instantly attracted to him; when he triumphs in charades at the feast of Adonis, she crowns him happily. Calchas, the High Priest, arranges for divine intervention to send her husband on a convenient excursion to Crete.

The Palace of Menelaus, Helen’s apartments.

Helen is preparing for games and a banquet, still begging Venus to help her resist Paris and protect her reputation; but when Paris suggests that her resistance could be taken to mean she is not the most beautiful woman in the world, her vanity is piqued. After the Kings have finished the Game of Goose, Helen retires to bed; when Paris, disguised as one of her guards, enters her room, she happily assumes he is the dream she has asked Calchas to arrange for her, only realizing the truth when Menelaus returns prematurely and discovers them together. He summons the Kings from the banquet and they chase Paris away; he swears he will return to fulfil the prophecy of Venus.

The shores of Sparta.

The court has come to the seaside; the games continue. After Menelaus’s defiance, Venus has taken revenge on the Greeks in the form of mass infidelity; husbands and wives are leaving each other in droves. Agamemnon begs Menelaus to save the nation from a gigantic Bacchanalia by sacrificing Helen to placate the goddess. They invoke the assistance of the High Priest of Venus, who arrives in a ship manned by cupids – and is, of course, Paris in disguise. He orders Helen to accompany him to the island of Cythera and sacrifice a hundred milk-white heifers to placate the wrath of Venus; at the urging of the crowd she sails away with him – thus, as we know from legend, beginning the Trojan War.