The court of Louis XVI is stripped to a faded, festering husk of itself in “The Flood,” a stark study of the king’s last days in which the luxurious trappings of French monarchy disappear before our eyes — until only its literal architecture remains. An impressively severe second feature by Italian director Gianluca Jodice, this is a brisk rejoinder to past cinematic portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that have rendered even their downfall in the most lavish way possible.
Such spectacle can have its own ironic purpose, as with the pointed whipped-cream excess of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 vision. But here, as played by Guillaume Canet and a blistering Mélanie Laurent, the deposed, imprisoned monarchs are mocked by whatever finery they’ve held onto: Looking shrunken and freeze-dried in their dirtied robes and increasingly unkempt wigs, they’re dead well ahead of their date with the guillotine. A rather sober opener for this year’s Locarno Film Festival, “The Flood” may come as a disappointment to viewers who prefer their royalty p*rn pretty and push, and not artfully painted in various shades of dry rot. But there’s something quietly transfixing about its austerity, while the film retains enough handsome Euro-arthouse sheen — atop the draw of its name stars — to sell widely.
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Drawn from the diaries of Louis XVI’s personal valet Jean-Baptiste Cléry (played by Fabrizio Rongione), the film begins in the immediate aftermath of the 1792 insurrection that saw the Tuileries Palace stormed by armed revolutionaries, and the monarchy abolished. Arrested, the royal family and their retinue arrive at the Tour du Temple, a large but sparsely appointed chateau in central Paris, where they are to be confined while their fate is determined.
As prisons go, it’s cushy by mere-mortal standards: In the single grand hall where they are to collectively live, rococo furniture is haphazardly assembled in a crude diorama of their former lodgings, minus any separating walls and doors. To the queen, her face an increasingly strained mask for her white-hot fury, they may as well have been cast into the wilderness. Constantly stressing the disparity in scale between aristocratically soaring ceilings and a dwindling floor plan, Tonino Zera’s superbly disheveled production design contributes to the dystopian air of proceedings, as does Daniele Ciprī’s parched, desaturated lensing: The world may not be ending for the rest of the country, but with a restless public calling for their heads, the royals may as well be barricaded against a zombie apocalypse.
The script, by the director with Filippo Gravino, traces Louis and Marie Antoinette’s plummeting status across three chapters. The first, titled “The Gods,” sees the newly stripped royals still treated with an echo of the regard in which they were held before: Public prosecutor Manuel (Tom Hudson) addresses them with deferential respect, even as he delivers lectures about democracy that are so alien to the former king as to be incomprehensible. (“What is that?” he asks, sincerely flummoxed, when the word “equality” is spoken.) Candelit dinners are provided, but with an early lights-out curfew. Such compromises, however, are a fond memory in the film’s second chapter, “The Men,” as the royal family’s allowances are further curtailed, their aides are banished from the chateau, and their chances of leaving this Parisian purgatory alive look ever slimmer. The third, titled “The Dead,” needs no further explanation.
While hardly a flattering portrait of these chilly, over-pampered elites (Canet’s Louis, in particular, is witless and ineffectual without with power), “The Flood” maintains a fairly apolitical view on their crimes, their punishment, and the ratio of one to the other. The film is more interested in the personal distress and intimate conflict they endure as their lives are held in limbo, and while you might call it humanizing in this respect, it’s not warmly so. The loveless void of their marriage is harshly exposed as more and more people disappear from this parody of a palace — leaving Marie Antoinette prey to the sexual attentions of her newly dominant minders.
Laurent is extraordinary as a queen who remains stubbornly imperious even with nothing left to lord over, her makeup growing harsher and more wraithlike as her gowns turn to drooping dust ruffles. (Oscar-nominated costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini gets the balance between splendor and squalor just right on these palpably sweat-sour fabrics.) Her posture stiff and brittle, her neck looking set to snap — with or without the blade’s help — under the weight of artificial hair and despair, she patrols her limited domain with a desperate, almost farcical sort of pride, until the pretense exhausts her, and she buckles into primal, animal screams. At her most vulnerable point, she asks a guard how she might secure a normal chateau for herself somehow, and how she might go about being a housewife — looking, for all the empty hope in her words, entirely like she’d rather die.
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