Dangerous Beauty

Veronica is an adventurous, curious, slightly tomboyish young woman in Venice. Her lover Marco (Rufus Sewell) cannot marry her because her family is not wealthy enough to provide a good dowry. Marco, a future Senator, marries a foreign noblewoman instead. Veronica’s mother (Jacqueline Bisset) must think of the future and her family’s financial security, as she still requires dowries for her younger daughters and money for her son’s commission. Rather than go to a convent, Veronica’s mother suggests she become a courtesan, a highly paid, cultured prostitute like her mother and grandmother before her. At first Veronica is repelled by the idea, but once she discovers that courtesans are allowed access to libraries and education, she tentatively embraces the idea.

Veronica quickly gains a reputation as a top courtesan, impressing the powerful men of Venice with her beauty, wit, and compassion. Marco finds it difficult to adjust to his new wife, who is nothing like Veronica, and becomes jealous as she takes his friends and relatives as lovers. After Marco’s cousin Maffio, a poor bard who was once publicly upstaged by Veronica, attacks her, Marco rushes to her aid. They rekindle their romance and Veronica stops seeing clients.

War breaks out between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, and the city appeals to France for aid. Veronica seduces the king of France and secures a military alliance. Marco becomes despondent that she has broken her promise of fidelity. Veronica points out that she sacrificed their love for the good of the city, while he only did it to protect his family’s political standing, and Marco leaves for war angry. While the Senators are fighting at sea, a plague hits the city. Religious zealots take the war and plague as punishment for the city’s moral degradation, and Veronica’s home is quarantined and almost ransacked by a mob.

Veronica is summoned to appear before the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft and refuses to name her clients. When it appears that she will be executed, Marco publicly shames the Venetian ministers and senators into standing. Bewildered by the extent of sin in the city, the Inquisitor drops the charges of witchcraft, and Marco and Veronica reconcile. —Wikipedia