The uncertain months between overthrow and execution that Louis XVI, the last king of France, and his wife Marie Antoinette spent locked up in a Paris chateau with their children in 1792 are the focus of Italian director Gianluca Jodice’s handsomely packaged but airless and stolid sophomore feature The Flood, which opened the Locarno Film Festival on the Piazza Grande. The entitlement and lavish trappings of absolute power are so second nature to the couple that they remain numb to the reality of their situation and the new equality of rights that revolutionaries intend the establishment of a republic to bring, even though artillery fire can be heard not far off, and the monarch has been ordered to answer for his reign at trial. We share the detached lack of urgency in this cloistered bubble, as these regime remnants await their fate, their relevance as stale to their captors as the unwashed lace flounces they stew in.
It’s not the first time Jodice has portrayed a historical figure in the eye of a storm of radical ideological transformation in Europe. His 2020 biographical drama The Bad Poet portrayed Decadent poet and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio, a one-time leftist whose nationalism influenced the fascism of Italian dictator Mussolini. The Flood gives glancing consideration to whether the deposed Louis XVI was guilty by nature or simply in the wrong role at a time when a symbolic sacrifice was called for, as the Enlightenment displaced divine principle via the guillotine, but the ethical quandaries of system change and responsibility largely take a backseat to a more drifting and repetitive sense of ennui and decay in the family’s final days.
The downfall of the monarchs in the eyes of the French public plays out over three chapters, titled “The Gods,” “The Men,” and “The Dead.” At first, they are welcomed to the Tour du Temple, a vast and elegant chateau, as if they are still highly respected personages, ushered into the grand quarters (though not before they’re addressed with a speech about liberty and equality) and a thrown-together approximation of the manner of living to which they have been accustomed at Versailles. A candlelit dinner is served, and despite revolutionary anti-clericalism, their request for Holy Mass is permitted, in a stay couched less as imprisonment, than concern for their safety from the public. But soon, their staff of preeners and confidantes is forcibly bundled off, to make it simpler to guard them, with just their valet remaining (this account has been pieced together from his diary, an opening title informs us.) As citizens admitted to the court leave a severed head, the rage of the masses becomes harder to ignore. The king, once called to heal men of scrofula due to a belief his divine touch held healing powers, is stripped of his medals and his title. Even cutlery, in the ultimate insult to royal decorum, is eventually banned as a possible aid to escape or injury.
Guillaume Canet plays Louis XVI as a somewhat benign and naive muddler, who cannot read the shifting tide or depth of anger driving the revolt, and believes the family will be able to find their place in the new order. It is Melanie Laurent as Marie Antoinette that is the stronger magnet of attention here, as a flinty, multifaceted royal who long ago found other avenues for closeness and fulfilment within their passionless union, and who chides her husband for ignoring the political danger to his position, though pat scripting keeps any fire to their interactions minimal. The queen is forced into a cannier survival mode than her husband when she becomes the reluctant sexual target of a captain in the chateau, while Louis is away dealing with his legal obligations. As a future beyond the luxury of Versailles grows more imminent, she probes a former underling on how she might manage the basic practicalities of shelter and subsistence, absurdly unprepared and panicked for any kind of existence independent of a huge waiting staff. High-end production and costume design ably recreate the milieu but, befitting a portrait of obsolescence, offer up few surprises beyond convention. A restrained soundtrack avoids triumphal bluster, with just one last release of anguish and torrential rain to mark a system being washed away.
Director: Gianluca Jodice
Screenwriters: Filippo Gravino, Gianluca Jodice
Editing: Giuseppe Trepiccione
Cast: Guillaume Canet, Mélanie Laurent
Producers: Matteo Rovere, Andrea Paris, Marco Colombo, Paolo Del Brocco
Cinematographer: Daniele Cipri
Music: Fabio Massimo Capogrosso
Production Design: Tonino Zera
Costume Design: Massimo Cantini Parrini
Production companies: Ascent Film (Italy), Rai Cinema (Italy), Adler Entertainment (Italy), YZE (Quad Cinema) (France)
Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Locarno (Piazza Grande)
In French
101 minutes
