Instead the job fell to Kapur, the Mumbai-born director whose Bandit Queen established his international reputation five years ago. His new film deals with the period from 1554, four years before the coronation of Elizabeth I, to 1572, the year in which she finally extinguished the enemies who had plotted to remove the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII and reinstall the Church of Rome.

Kapur's commercial hook is provided by the well-publicised decision of Kapur and Michael Hirst, the author of the screenplay, to deal boldly with the issue of Elizabeth's single most legendary characteristic. ``I had to make a choice,'' the director says,``whether I wanted the details of history or the emotions and essence of history to prevail.'' For once, the commitment to emotional truth appears to have incurred no penalty in terms of historical integrity, thanks not least to the qualities brought to the central character by the remarkable Cate Blanchett, who manages to persuade us that, given enough willpower, a woman can regain her virginity.

There have been many celluloid versions of Elizabeth, from Sarah Bernhardt to Glenda Jackson via Flora Robson, Bette Davis and Jean Simmons. Blanchett's triumph is to create a thoroughly convincing depiction of the journey from canoodling girlhood to the threshold of an imperial monarchy, battling her fears, shedding illusions, absorbing pain, learning judgment, turning anxiety into resolution, acquiring steel and sinew.

When we meet her, she is aged 21 and already in love with Lord Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (the liquid-eyed Joseph Fiennes). The untimely death of the childless Queen Mary (Kathy Burke)brings her reluctantly to the throne, unprepared for the pressure to marry a Catholic -- either the King of Spain or the Duc d'Anjou, for preference -- and to produce an heir.This is a world of tallow candles and velvet drapes, of menacing shadows and distant footsteps echoing on flagstones, of the camera looking directly down on momentous events (the burning of martyrs, an interrogation, a coronation) like a recording angel. Kapur and his designer, John Myhre, and costumier, Alexandra Byrne, make an intelligent mainstream assimilation of the visual vernacular created by Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. Unlike Patrice Chereau's not dissimilar La Reine Margot, the viewer is not made to feel that the project has been hijacked by Bruce Weber and turned into an ad for Calvin Klein underwear.

Knights, courtiers and bishops loom like giant chess pieces, with Elizabeth pursued across the board by her chief adversary, the sinister Duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston), whose advocacy of the Catholic cause isabetted by the ambassadors of Spain (James Frain) and France (Eric Cantona), pressing the suit of their masters. The Queen's support comes first from the ineffectual Sir William Cecil (Richard Attenborough), whose advice leads to a massacre on the Scottish border at the hands of the French, and later from Sir Francis Walsingham, her Master of Spies and consigliere, given a cool, dangerous and watchful presence in Geoffrey Rush's memorable portrayal.

At the head of a small but distinguished French contingent, Cantona refrains from kicking anyone, but raises his eyebrows and delivers his lines with a hauteur that will give his old fans a nostalgic thrill. If the business of Elizabeth's betrothal to the Duc d'Anjou had gone to a penalty shoot-out, you wouldn't have bet against the Frogs as long as Eric le Fou was on the park.

As the hilariously perverse Anjou, Vincent Cassel invests the repetition of a single word -- `Well? Well?' -- with a world of comic petulance, broadening still further the range heshowed in La Haine and L'Appartemnt. Fanny Ardant plays his bloodthirsty aunt Mary of Guise, the widow of James V of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who sends Elizabeth a gift from the battlefield: a French flag stained with English blood.

The enemy inside the palace wall is embodied in the scheming priest John Ballard, played by Daniel Craig, who thus leaps in the space of a fortnight from one screaming Pope to another: from Francis Bacon's canvases in Love Is The Devil to an audience with John Gielgud's pontiff, issuing a papal fatwa against the Queen of England. Craig's mission involves the use of a poisoned frock, one idea that has so far eluded even Alexander McQueen.

In two very different sequences -- the rehearsal of her key speech to Parliament, cleverly mounted by Kapur and his cinematographer, Remi Adefarasin, and the delivery of the speech in which she claims possession of `the heart of a man' -- Blanchett is nothing short of electrifying. And in her climactic transfiguration, theface that first presented itself in undefended mobility is hardened into a mask, while the voice descends to a Thatcherian contralto profundo.

Kapur fills his palaces and cathedrals with enough diseased ambition to rival Kane's Xanadu, creates a picturesque battlefield, and lights a night-time riverscape with fireworks that appropriately cast more shadow than light. Fans of Coppola's Godfather series will nod approvingly at the dark choreography that brings the various traitors to their simultaneous fates, accompanied by a soaring choir.

Elsewhere there is sometimes a little too much reliance on orchestral music, although the choice of Elgar's stately Nimrod to underscore Elizabeth's final confrontation with Leicester is inspired. In fact, you can't help hoping the same team is planning the sequel. On this form, their Elizabeth II would be something to see.