‘The Flood’ Review: An Intriguing Palace Drama Chronicling the Last Days of France’s Ultimate Royal Couple

The famous French saying, “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”) has often been attributed to Louis XV, who used it to express his total disinterest in what would happen to the world after his own demise. If things fell apart, well, too bad. And yet it’s the king’s own grandson, Louis XVI, who was ousted from power during the French Revolution and died on the guillotine, to whom the quote is most applicable. His death, as well as that of his wife, Marie-Antoinette, marked the end of the monarchy and the height of the Reign of Terror. It was also the start of one of the first modern democracies, with all its grandeurs and flaws.

Related Stories

Business

Warner Bros. Discovery Olympics Coverage Hits Streaming Records

TV

Kit Harington Says "Mistakes Were Made" Making a "Rushed" 'Game of Thrones' Season 8

The unpleasant final days of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are the subject of The Flood (Le Déluge), by Italian director Gianluca Jodice (The Bad Poet), who focuses solely on the period in which the royal pair were held prisoner before their very public executions — although only Louis’ death is accounted for here. It’s a subject that’s been given peripheral treatment in numerous other historical dramas, ranging from Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise to Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette to Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen, that usually depict the king’s and queen’s lives before their fall from grace.

In this retelling, the two have already hit rock bottom and are left to deal with the consequences, sequestered along with their children and a few loyal servants in the Temple Prison, a dingy fortress located in the center of Paris. Forced to contend with their troubled marriage, their loss of immense wealth and the end of nearly 1,000 years of monarchal reign, the couple nonetheless tries to make the most of it. Surprisingly, they wind up becoming more vulnerable and human, and even admirable, in ways that weren’t previously possible. Perhaps the Revolution wasn’t such a bad thing for them after all.

Given that we all know how their story ends, Jodice and co-writer Filippo Gravino take some liberties with what happens before that, depicting the king and queen as characters whose numerous ordeals help them to grow as people.

Louis (Guillaume Canet) starts off as a befuddled ruler who seems to be in well over his head. But he ends up a knowing and loving patriarch, capable of dying with dignity. Marie-Antoinette (Mélanie Laurent) is a mercurial royal pain only interested in the fate of her latest lover. But by the time her husband is marched off to be guillotined at the Place de la Concorde before hundreds of people, she’s shown to be both sympathetic and fiercely committed to her family.

Whether or not any of this is true is uncertain, and The Flood feels more like speculative fiction than historical record. (Per the opening credits, the story was inspired by the journal of Louis’ personal valet, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, played here by Italian actor Fabrizio Rongione.) The film also feels, at times, like an apology for the French monarchy, depicting the king and queen as innocent victims instead of as the careless and often merciless rulers they were.

Meanwhile, the revolutionaries are mostly portrayed as bloodthirsty scoundrels trying their best to humiliate the royals in any way possible — including one sequence where a malicious prison guard (Hugo Dillon) coerces Marie-Antoinette into a sexual relationship, offering her certain privileges in exchange.

If the narrative seems exaggerated in places, nuanced performances from both Canet and Laurent help to make the famous couple more than mere caricatures.

As in most screen depictions, Louis initially comes across as a droopy sad sack with little connection to reality, ignoring the empire crumbling at his feet while hoping God will swoop down and make everything alright. But Canet, who’s hardly recognizable beneath all the layers of prosthetics, also reveals another side to the ruler, showing him to be more deft than we imagined. He seems keenly aware of his wife’s many infidelities, accepting them as par for the course in a royal marriage. And when he learns of his death sentence at the hands of the républicains, he takes it with considerable grace, doing his best to ease the blow on his family.

With the exception, perhaps, of Kirsten Dunst’s ethereal portrayal in the Coppola movie, Marie-Antoinette has never been a very likable character in popular culture. Even in the opening ceremony of this year’s Paris Olympics, the queen was shown singing rock opera while gleefully holding her own decapitated head in her hands.  

But Laurent manages to give her depth and compassion, depicting Marie-Antoinette as a woman intelligent enough to overlook Louis’ flaws and hypocrisies in order to maintain appearances. (“My husband is an honest man,” she tells a confidant early on. “His only fault is that he’s king.”)

There are some over-the-top, cringeworthy outbursts from the actress in the film’s second half, when it becomes clear there’s no way out for the fallen queen. But even then, she shows an awareness of how out of their league the couple was in the face of massive public condemnation, telling her husband in one final heart-to-heart: “We were acting in a play, but the roles were too big for us.”

Jodice deserves credit for going deep with two people to whom history has not been all that kind, while never shying away from the darker sides of the French Revolution: In the year that followed Louis’ execution, roughly 40,000 people would be killed, many of them at the guillotine. It was called the Reign of Terror for a reason.

If the director’s version of events can feel one-sided, that’s because his compassion clearly lies with his protagonists — two aristocrats who probably weren’t downright evil, but represented a system that had accumulated too many evil consequences for the French population. The latter are mostly kept hidden from the viewer, with the action restraining itself to a handful of interiors artfully captured by cinematographer Daniele Ciprì, who employs an array of tableaux-like images recalling the work of Peter Greenaway.

Yet the film’s limited scope is also its one major flaw, preventing us from grasping the monumental changes that are happening right outside the prison walls. Just because Louis and Marie-Antoinette ignored the will of the people until it came back to bite them big time, it doesn’t mean the director had to do so as well, and Jodice seems too enamored with his subjects to see the bigger picture.

What followed their deaths was a deluge indeed, but it was one that washed away centuries of despotism, paving the way for the world we now live in. The Flood depicts this as an end, whereas it was really a beginning.