In "Le Déluge" a Marie Antoinette as you've never seen her awaits you

As to why Marie Antoinette continues to be one of the figures most investigated by books, TV series and cinema, director and screenwriter Gianluca Jodice has his own idea: «There is the banal and immediate one that takes us back to the period of Versailles, in which the queen's youthful and adolescent soul has remained crystallised, especially since the release of Sofia Coppola's film, and continues to fascinate with its mythical vernacular. In Le Déluge, however, we did not want to stop there, we dug into the responsible and tragic side of a very short period for the sovereign, in which her being a mother, wife and affectionate companion turns out to be an unusual and little explored attachment in the intimate and royal relationship she had with Louis XVI ‘. It is this last parenthesis that the author, in his second film after The Bad Poetand co-written with Filippo Gravino, wished to investigate. An investigation ‘more on reason than on freedom, a complex discourse that sees the enlightened one wanting to chase away any shadow from the individual, even going so far as to punish the slightest impurity, somehow becoming far more violent and degenerating into logical rationalism»

Reasonings and philosophies that Jodice takes up and adapts in Le Déluge - The Last Days of Marie Antoinette, which arrives in Italy on 21 November in cinemas after having been premiered at the Locarno Festival, while in France it is expected on Christmas Day. A work inspired by the diaries of the valet Cléry, who assisted the royal family during her imprisonment in 1792, up to her beheading. If in the first film Jodice directed Sergio Castellitto in the role of the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, this time Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent are his leading stars: «I know the language because I graduated on a French philosopher and the professor demanded that I read the texts in the original. I understand it well, I speak it less, but when I arrived on the set, I had the script so clear in my mind that I knew there would be no problems, no more than an ambitious, historical film requires.» A director such as Woody Allen, when he directed his last feature film Coup de chance, shot in the neighbourhoods of Paris, said that he did not understand what the actors were saying to each other while they were acting in French, but he guessed if the scene was going well because of the intentions they put in: «Unfortunately, we could not afford Allen's snobbery,» Jodice comments ironically. «Telling such a specific moment in time, made up of emblematic passages in history, we made use of some linguists to make the language accessible to the spectator, but faithful to the 18th-century reconstruction. »

A bit like the work done on the prosthetic make-up of a Louis XVI that hides the actor Canet under a face and physicality not his own, of which only the cut of his eyes is recognisable. «I like to hide actors, but I don't look for a forced resemblance, as happens in much American cinema. A performer must evoke a character, not imitate him, it's a very delicate balance. Otherwise we end up with products like Bohemian Rhapsody in which Rami Malek is identical, but has nothing to do with the spirit of Freddy Mercury. The only risk Guillaume took was to get lost under the make-up given the subtle performance the character required. Some people believe that Louis VXI was asperger's, so we delved into this trait and Canet got help from a friend of his who teaches courses with people with autism so as not to make blatant gestures, but also not to castrate his expressiveness too much. »

A preparation and a result that you can achieve «when you have extraordinary actors, outstanding actors, » says Jodice. «Actors who loved the script and entered into a kind of co-production, so that they even gave up a little of their share of the compensation to allow the film to see the light of day.» Performers with whom it is also possible to tackle even the most difficult sequences. One in particular troubled the protagonist Laurent before shooting, a heart-rending scream that encapsulates the one and only immense moment of pain in a ’ prison drama ’, as the author likes to call it, in which Marie Antoinette vents and draws out all the restrained suffering that marked the end of both the monarchy and their lives. «Mélanie had the nightmare of that scene. She does not live in the centre of France, she has a house far from the salons of Paris, in the south of the country, and she told me that to get ready she used to go down to the rocks and scream at the water. I asked her what was bothering her, she was obsessed with the sequence and wondered if it should last so long. On editing it was cut slightly, although it remained an exhausting moment as the situation demanded, but we still shot it for as long as necessary. During the scene he was wearing headphones and I found out later that while he was screaming he was listening to music. She didn't want to know anything about this animal pain that the character brings out and which, for me, was exciting to shoot, because it is the sign of a diabolical imprisonment from which the characters could not escape and which went back to a legend that wanted the queen to be desperate at the moment when her husband reveals his destiny to her, so much so that her screams could be heard all the way to the heart of Paris.»

Between folk tales and historical fidelity, for Le Déluge - The Last Days of Marie-Antoinette, the director had to not only reconstruct or study, but also forget an entire world of references to costume films or pictorial art, to allow the film to find its own identity, always with the shadow of Stanley Kublick's Barry Lyndon behind it. «I was reminded of what Danilo Donati, set and costume designer ofFederico Fellini’s films, used to say. When asked about the aesthetic method he adopted for Casanova, he replied that he would go to the museum, look at all the 18th century paintings he could find, then close his eyes, leave and reproduce what he had left. Although in Le Déluge there was no such deletion of detail, I was struck by this desire for platonic rather than real reproduction, an example of a work that returns to the essence.» And it was exactly the essence of the three chapters that subdivide the film - the gods, the men, the dead - that guided the hand of Massimo Cantini Parrini, Oscar-nominated costume designer for Matteo Garrone's Pinocchio and Joe Wright's Cyrano, whose work in 2024 also includes Pablo Larraín's Maria and the series M - The Child of the Centurywith Luca Marinelli. «Massimo, like a certain type of genius, is lazy, so when he read the script he immediately fell in love with it because he thought that, being in prison, they would all have one costume. Beyond the joke, he is an artist of superior elegance, who is not only interested in beauty, but in historical truthfulness and who is being portrayed. He knows what a dress means to a character at a precise moment. So for Le Déluge, after having sought royalty in gold for him and silver for her, he worked in layers, with the idea of gradually stripping the protagonists chapter by chapter, soiling more and more what remained of their sumptuous clothes that had arrived from Olympus and ended up in hell.»

Among other major collaborations, the presence in the production of Paolo Sorrentino, with whom Gianluca Jodice shares a childhood of shooting short films together and, as the author of È stato la mano di Dio (The Hand of God) recounts, the change of life in moving from Naples to Rome, stands out. «Le Déluge is an Italian-French co-production.Let's face it, knowing the people specifically, it wasn't exactly taken for granted that they would accept that a director on his second film would choose to narrate a crucial period such as the French Revolution, and I would say almost rightly so. So, after an initial period of anguished dialectic about financing, about whether the film should be made or not, I called Paolo who has a large fan base in France, and after reading and loving the script he decided to enter the production, aligning contributions from both countries» So Le Déluge - The Last Days of Marie Antoinette arrives in cinemas at a crucial moment for the fate of an entire globalised world, adrift of security and, perhaps, of ideals. A rift, albeit different from the revolution referred to in the film, whose sensation of enormous social, political and cultural transformation is not so far removed from the great (and often frightening) changes that every country is going through. «It was the audience itself that made this clear,’ explains Jodice. ’ Many say how blatant the hook to contemporaneity is, even though it is never theorised in the film. It is the sense of vertigo that one feels at the threshold of historical changes, an apocalyptic atmosphere about something that is about to end and that opens up an unknown future. We ourselves, today, live in the ambiguity of not knowing or understanding what is going to happen, in which an underlying hysteria and anguish is perceived, in which the principles that had been bandied about have been disillusioned, so much so that in these terms Le Déluge is a film that is more metaphysical than historical. »

A work about the past that builds a bridge to the present, which for Jodice «seems to be getting worse and worse, without sophistry or rhetoric. And it is not about the right or the left, but an anthropological deterioration. Exactly as historical films tend to highlight, one realises how an ethical conscience, a conscience of justice, is often lacking in such brackets. One is enveloped by an irrepressible irrationalism, which is my blackest fear. There is no enlightenment that holds when an avalanche like this comes along.» Who knows if these will be themes that Gianluca Jodice will also address in his next film on which he is already at work and which, after the threshold of World War II with The Bad Poetand the French Revolution with Le Déluge, will be set in the contemporary world: «I did not look for costume works, making two in a row just happened. I am not a historian, nor do I have any particular quirks. If I had to find the trait that most unites my two films made so far, I would say it is the sense of the end, whether of an era or of a character. Great protagonists touching high and traumatic moments, reaching the point of no return.»