Interview with Gianluca Jodice on the opening film of Locarno “The Flood”

Locarno is preparing for a veritable flood – in more ways than one! The 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival promises a veritable flood of arthouse films. And it opens Wednesday night with the world premiere of Floodingwhich will take the 8,000 spectators in the Piazza Grande of the Swiss city on a journey through the history of France.

The film by Italian director and co-writer Gianluca Jodice The flood (Flooding) stars Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. But the film takes place in 1792, when the two men and their children are arrested and imprisoned in a Paris castle, awaiting trial.

Locarno audiences will be treated to a double treat. In addition to enjoying the world premiere in a sumptuous setting, they will also be able to see the film’s two French stars receive the Davide Campari Award of Excellence as part of Locarno’s opening night festivities.

“It’s literally an apocalyptic film: it’s about the moment when all the veils and masks are removed,” Jodice explains of Flooding in a note on the Locarno77 website. “It has a metaphysical rather than historical ambition and explores a personal apocalypse: that of the protagonists.”

Before the official start of Locarno, Jodice, in an email interview, said THRGeorg Szalai talks about the motivations behind his new film, why history appeals to him so much, the challenges of staying true to the past, and what lies ahead.

Why did exploring the final days of two French historical figures, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, appeal to you so much? And is their story well known in Italy?

I can’t answer precisely. The films you make are always icebergs. Behind, under the film that appears, there are months or years of accumulated feelings, desires, notes, missed films, ideas and – a lot of unconscious things! Certainly, the idea of ​​making the death of a single man, the last god-king of Europe, coincide with the end of an entire era, the end of monarchies and the birth of the contemporary era was an exciting opportunity to superimpose the tragic – the destiny of the individual – with the politico-philosophical – the fall of the Ancien Régime, history.

And then, well, like everywhere else, in Italy too, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, especially because of their end, are two popular and well-known characters. Even if, to tell the truth, the brief passage that my film tells does not seem very well-known to me. Not even to the French.

Your movie The Bad Poet also had a historical context, the Mussolini regime. Do you prefer to work with history and why??

So far, that’s how it is. A bit by chance – or maybe not. I still don’t know quite how to interpret why my first two films are “historical” films. I am certainly 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 the truths previously…