The court of Louis XVI is stripped down to its faded, festering shell in The Flood, a haunting study of the king’s final days in which the luxurious trappings of the French monarchy vanish before our eyes – until only its literal architecture remains. This impressively austere second feature from Italian director Gianluca Jodice is a brisk rejoinder to previous film portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which depicted even their downfall in the most lavish of ways.
Such spectacles can have their own ironic purpose, like the lacey whipped-cream excesses of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 vision. But here, played by Guillaume Canet and a fiery Mélanie Laurent, the deposed, imprisoned monarchs are mocked by the finery they still retain: looking shrunken and freeze-dried in their filthy robes and increasingly unkempt wigs, they are dead long before their rendezvous with the guillotine. A more sober opener to this year’s Locarno Film Festival, “The Flood” may be a disappointment to viewers who prefer their royal porno pretty and brash rather than artfully painted in various shades of dry rot. But there is something quietly fascinating about its austerity, while the film – in addition to its big-name stars – retains enough of the handsome European arthouse sheen to sell well.
Based on the diaries of Jean-Baptiste Cléry (played by Fabrizio Rongione), the personal servant of Louis XVI, the film begins immediately after the uprising of 1792, in which the Tuileries Palace was stormed by armed revolutionaries and the monarchy was abolished. After their arrest, the royal family and their entourage reach the Tour du Temple, a large but sparsely furnished palace in the center of Paris, where they are imprisoned while their fate is decided.
For a prison, it’s cozy by mere mortal standards: in the single grand hall where they’re meant to live together, Rococo furniture is haphazardly thrown together in a crude diorama of their former quarters, minus all partitions and doors. For the queen, whose face is an increasingly tense mask of her fervent rage, they might as well have been banished to the wilderness. Tonino Zera’s wonderfully disheveled production design, which constantly emphasizes the difference in scale between aristocratically high ceilings and a shrinking floor plan, adds to the dystopian atmosphere of the proceedings, as does Daniele Ciprī’s desiccated, desaturated camerawork: for the rest of the country, the world may not be ending, but with a restless public calling for their heads, the royals might as well be barricading themselves against a zombie apocalypse.
The screenplay, co-written by the director with Filippo Gravino, traces the declining status of Louis and Marie Antoinette in three chapters. In the first chapter, titled “The Gods,” the newly disrobed royals are still treated with the same deference they were previously shown: Prosecutor Manuel (Tom Hudson) treats them with deferential respect, even as he lectures the former king on democracy so foreign as to be incomprehensible. (“What is that?” he asks, genuinely baffled when the word “equality” is mentioned.) Candlelit dinners are offered, albeit with an early night’s rest. Such compromises, however, are a pleasant reminder in the film’s second chapter, “The Men,” as the royal family’s allowances are further slashed, their aides are banished from the castle, and their chances of leaving this Parisian purgatory alive become increasingly slim. The third chapter, titled “The Dead,” needs no further explanation.
Although The Flood is hardly a flattering portrait of these cold, pampered elites (Canet’s Louis in particular is mindless and ineffectual without power), it maintains a fairly apolitical view of their crimes, their punishment, and the relationship of one to the other. The film is more interested in the personal hardship and intimate conflict they endure while their lives are held in the balance, and while it could be called humanizing in this respect, it is not exactly warm. The loveless emptiness of their marriage is brutally laid bare as more and more people disappear from this parody of a palace – leaving Marie Antoinette to the sexual attentions of her new dominant minders.
Laurent is extraordinary as a queen who remains doggedly imperious even when she has nothing left to control. Her makeup becomes more severe and ghostly as her dresses become drooping ruffles. (Oscar-nominated costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini finds just the right balance of splendor and misery on these palpably sweat-drenched fabrics.) Her posture is stiff and brittle, her neck looking as though it would break—with or without the aid of a blade—under the weight of fake hair and despair. She patrols her limited realm with a desperate, almost absurd kind of pride, until the pretense exhausts her and she bursts into primal, animalistic screams. At her most vulnerable, she asks a guard how she could possibly secure a normal castle and manage to be a housewife—looking, for all the empty hope in her words, as though she would rather die.
