The well-known French saying, “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”) has usually been attributed to Louis XV, who used it to specific his whole disinterest in what would occur to the world after his personal demise. If issues fell aside, properly, too dangerous. And but it’s the king’s personal grandson, Louis XVI, who was ousted from energy in the course of the French Revolution and died on the guillotine, to whom the quote is most relevant. His dying, in addition to that of his spouse, Marie-Antoinette, marked the top of the monarchy and the peak of the Reign of Terror. It was additionally the beginning of one of many first trendy democracies, with all its grandeurs and flaws.

The disagreeable closing days of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are the topic of The Flood (Le Déluge), by Italian director Gianluca Jodice (The Unhealthy Poet), who focuses solely on the interval during which the royal pair had been held prisoner earlier than their very public executions — though solely Louis’ dying is accounted for right here. It’s a topic that’s been given peripheral therapy in quite a few different historic dramas, starting from Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise to Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette to Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen, that often depict the king’s and queen’s lives earlier than their fall from grace.

On this retelling, the 2 have already hit all-time low and are left to cope with the implications, sequestered together with their kids and some loyal servants within the Temple Jail, a dingy fortress positioned within the heart of Paris. Compelled to take care of their troubled marriage, their lack of immense wealth and the top of practically 1,000 years of monarchal reign, the couple nonetheless tries to take advantage of it. Surprisingly, they wind up turning into extra weak and human, and even admirable, in ways in which weren’t beforehand doable. Maybe the Revolution wasn’t such a foul factor for them in any case.

On condition that everyone knows how their story ends, Jodice and co-writer Filippo Gravino take some liberties with what occurs earlier than that, depicting the king and queen as characters whose quite a few ordeals assist them to develop as individuals.

Louis (Guillaume Canet) begins off as a befuddled ruler who appears to be in properly over his head. However he finally ends up a realizing and loving patriarch, able to dying with dignity. Marie-Antoinette (Mélanie Laurent) is a mercurial royal ache solely within the destiny of her newest lover. However by the point her husband is marched off to be guillotined on the Place de la Concorde earlier than a whole lot of individuals, she’s proven to be each sympathetic and fiercely dedicated to her household.

Whether or not or not any of that is true is unsure, and The Flood feels extra like speculative fiction than historic document. (Per the opening credit, the story was impressed by the journal of Louis’ private valet, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, performed right here by Italian actor Fabrizio Rongione.) The movie additionally feels, at instances, like an apology for the French monarchy, depicting the king and queen as harmless victims as an alternative of because the careless and infrequently cruel rulers they had been.

In the meantime, the revolutionaries are largely portrayed as bloodthirsty scoundrels attempting their greatest to humiliate the royals in any manner doable — together with one sequence the place a malicious jail guard (Hugo Dillon) coerces Marie-Antoinette right into a sexual relationship, providing her sure privileges in alternate.

If the narrative appears exaggerated in locations, nuanced performances from each Canet and Laurent assist to make the well-known couple greater than mere caricatures.

As in most display screen depictions, Louis initially comes throughout as a droopy unhappy sack with little connection to actuality, ignoring the empire crumbling at his ft whereas hoping God will swoop down and make every little thing alright. However Canet, who’s hardly recognizable beneath all of the layers of prosthetics, additionally reveals one other facet to the ruler, displaying him to be extra deft than we imagined. He appears keenly conscious of his spouse’s many infidelities, accepting them as par for the course in a royal marriage. And when he learns of his dying sentence by the hands of the républicains, he takes it with appreciable grace, doing his greatest to ease the blow on his household.

With the exception, maybe, of Kirsten Dunst’s ethereal portrayal within the Coppola film, Marie-Antoinette has by no means been a really likable character in standard tradition. Even within the opening ceremony of this 12 months’s Paris Olympics, the queen was proven singing rock opera whereas gleefully holding her personal decapitated head in her fingers.  

However Laurent manages to offer her depth and compassion, depicting Marie-Antoinette as a girl clever sufficient to miss Louis’ flaws and hypocrisies as a way to preserve appearances. (“My husband is an trustworthy man,” she tells a confidant early on. “His solely fault is that he’s king.”)

There are some over-the-top, cringeworthy outbursts from the actress within the movie’s second half, when it turns into clear there’s no manner out for the fallen queen. However even then, she exhibits an consciousness of how out of their league the couple was within the face of large public condemnation, telling her husband in a single closing heart-to-heart: “We had been appearing in a play, however the roles had been too huge for us.”

Jodice deserves credit score for going deep with two individuals to whom historical past has not been all that sort, whereas by no means shying away from the darker sides of the French Revolution: Within the 12 months that adopted Louis’ execution, roughly 40,000 individuals could be killed, lots of them on the guillotine. It was known as the Reign of Terror for a purpose.

If the director’s model of occasions can really feel one-sided, that’s as a result of his compassion clearly lies along with his protagonists — two aristocrats who in all probability weren’t downright evil, however represented a system that had accrued too many evil penalties for the French inhabitants. The latter are largely saved hidden from the viewer, with the motion restraining itself to a handful of interiors artfully captured by cinematographer Daniele Ciprì, who employs an array of tableaux-like pictures recalling the work of Peter Greenaway.

But the movie’s restricted scope can be its one main flaw, stopping us from greedy the monumental modifications which are occurring proper outdoors the jail partitions. Simply because Louis and Marie-Antoinette ignored the need of the individuals till it got here again to chunk them huge time, it doesn’t imply the director had to take action as properly, and Jodice appears too enamored along with his topics to see the larger image.

What adopted their deaths was a deluge certainly, however it was one which washed away centuries of despotism, paving the best way for the world we now stay in. The Flood depicts this as an finish, whereas it was actually a starting.