Locarno is getting ready for a flood – in more than one sense! The 77th edition of the is promising a veritable flood of arthouse movies. And it will open on Wednesday night with the world premiere of , which will take the 8,000-strong audience of the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on a journey into French history. Italian director and co-writer Gianluca Jodice’s ( ) features and Guillaume Canet as none other than Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
But the film is set in 1792 when the two and their children were arrested and imprisoned in a chateau in Paris, awaiting their trial. The Locarno audience is in for a double treat. In addition to getting to enjoy the world premiere in a gorgeous setting, it will also see the two French stars of the movie receiving the Excellence Award Davide Campari as part of the Locarno opening night festivities.
“This is literally an apocalyptic film: it deals with the moment when all veils and all masks are stripped away,” Jodice explains about in a note on the Locarno77 website. “It has a metaphysical rather than a historical ambition and explores a personal apocalypse: that of the protagonists.” Before Locarno officially kicks off, Jodice, in an email interview, told ‘s Georg Szalai about the motivations behind his new movie, why history has such appeal to him, the challenges of being true to the past, and what is next for him.
I can’t answer precisely. The films you make are always icebergs. Behind, underneath the film that appears, there are months or years of accumulated feelings, desires, notes, missed films, ideas and – a lot of unconscious stuff! Certainly, the idea of matching the death of a single man, the last king-god of Europe, with the end of an entire era, the end of monarchies, and the birth of the contemporary age was an exciting opportunity to superimpose the tragic – the fate of the individual – on the political-philosophical – the fall of the Ancien Regime, history.
Then, well, like everywhere else, in Italy too, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, especially because of their end, are two pop and well-known figures. Although to tell the truth, the brief passage my film recounts I don’t think is that well known. Not even by the French.
? So far it has been so. Somewhat by accident – or maybe not. I still don’t quite know how to interpret why my first two films are “historical” films.
Surely, I am fascinated by the phenomenology of the end. Of the fall. The last meter in the corridor of life – of a man, of a regime, of a nation – where truths previously kept at bay by hypocrisy, political necessity, dissimulation, cowardice come out.
But I can tell you that surely my next film will have a contemporary setting. If there are analogies and parallels to the current political situation, they were not sought programmatically or rationally. That’s not what prompted me to make the film, that’s it.
Surely this kind of apocalyptic, violent, uncontrollable, hysterical emotion – history changes always produce traumatic transitions – links the two historical moments. Hysterical, historical..
. mmh. The truth: no, I didn’t think about them while writing the film.
I made two films and never thought about the actors during the writing process. When the script was finished, we began to study the French names. Seeing films I hadn’t seen, looking at careers, paths.
Of course, I already knew Mélanie and Guillaume but then the decisive stage is always the encounter. The personal encounter that clears away the fog and illuminates. I don’t know, maybe I’ll give you a disappointing answer: in a historical film that showcases such universal characters and setting, you have to be so careful about every little thing, and I’m talking to you about makeup, the curl of a wig, the color of a hat, the pronunciation of that word, the choice of vocabulary, which has to be true to the era but accessible to a contemporary audience – the believability, the tightness of the whole.
In short, the biggest challenge was staying alive. As a producer friend of mine says: “If you make a film about a postal worker and it comes out wrong, you fall 10 meters. If you make a film about Marie-Antoinette and it comes out wrong, you fall 10,000 meters.
” Yes. I am writing an erotic noir. Something like that.
Difficult. Hopefully in English. Mmh.
.. very complex question.
More than falsehood/illusion versus truth I would speak of paradigms. At some point, the new imposes itself because there is a widespread feeling that it speaks better to the present time, while the past drags on more and more emptied and incapable of giving effective and convincing answers – the same past that had previously been in turn the new compared to the time even before. I don’t want to throw everything into radical relativism, but each time has its own truth, its own social, political, and even sentimental creed.
Its own paradigm. Like a monad closed in on itself. It is no coincidence that when we look back at the dynamics of past eras we often almost laugh.
The title I chose very early on, even while we were writing the subject with Filippo Gravino. It obviously comes from the famous phrase “après moi le déluge” (“after me, the flood”) of Louis XV, who precisely had already smelled that soon in France everything was going to blow up. The division into three acts.
.. I have always, since the writing, been very keen on making a film that is more metaphysical than historical.
A film set only in a gloomy castle, with a theatrical-like division into acts, with a strong stylization – from the classicism of the first act to the shoulder camera in the second act, which is more unique than rare for a historical film. In this sense also the three acts, The Gods, The Men, The Dead, referred me to the three moments that mark the passage of every man in life. Again: from heaven to the fall.
The last sentence in the film spoken by the revolutionary I didn’t write! There, you brought me to focus on one of the first moments when I decided to make this film: I was at my father’s house in Naples – I live in Rome – and I happened to read a book about the trial of Louis XVI. There were the minutes of the trial, with the accusations of the revolutionaries and the king’s answers. Then the book also carried accounts of the day of the king’s execution: as the procession leading him to the gallows passed through the streets of Paris, a group of revolutionaries were gathered in a house, and in the mournful and not at all joyful silence of the moment, one of them said exactly that phrase.
I thought it was wonderful, and I immediately thought that I had to write the movie and end it with those words about the [king’s] dog. [It] seemed to me to be perfect for the mood of the film, which is told not like a thousand other films about revolutions – the joy of victory, the excitement of new horizons being conquered, but a smaller and perhaps more authentic feeling about each victory: melancholy. THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day More from The Hollywood Reporter.
