Film Review
With its 17 million euro budget, lavish production values and star-studded
cast,
Un peuple et son roi (
One Nation, One King) positioned
itself as the French blockbuster of the year, but ended up as an embarrassing
flop for its writer-director Pierre Schoeller. Visually stunning the
film may be (its sets and costumes both secured César nominations in
2019), but it is a pretty hollow exercise in historical reconstruction, and
by trying to cram far too much incident into one two-hour epic (covering the
run of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1793) it was bound to end up as
a pretty incoherent jumble.
Un peuple et son roi marks a dramatic change of direction for Schoeller,
who made his impressive cinematic debut back in 2008 with
Versailles, a poignant social realist
drama that gave the actor Guillaume Depardieu one of his best screen roles
before his untimely death in 2008. This was followed by the quirky political
fantasy
L'Exercice de l'État
(2011), which garnered further praise from the critics. With his extravagant
third feature, it is clear right from the off that Schoeller has massively
overreached himself. Despite the abundance of talent on both sides of
the camera, the film is nothing more than an interminable succession of dazzling
vignettes that completely fail to gel into a satisfying whole.
Schoeller's idea of interweaving recorded historical incidents with fictional
dramas is generally a good one, as it gives an appreciation of the extent
that the ordinary folk of France had in the Revolution (something that tends
to get underplayed in most films and textbooks). Olivier Gourmet's avuncular
glassblower provides both a convincing character and a powerful visual metaphor
for the dramatic events that are about to overrun the country, with a new
nation forged like molten glass out of a fiery furnace of passion. Gaspard
Ulliel and Adèle Haenel likewise have an impact as two of the hot-headed
insurrectionists who become romantically involved, and elsewhere we take
some amusement from the somewhat eccentric casting of Louis Garrel as Robespierre
and Denis Lavant as Marat.
With such a talented cast at its disposal,
Un peuple et son roi certainly
isn't let down by its acting. Neither can its camerawork and design
be faulted - both are of an exceptionally high standard. The film's
failure lies not in its production but in a script that is painfully didactic
and lacking in focus. As a consequence, the film looks like a long series
of history lectures that have been inexpertly abridged and cobbled together
with absolutely no appreciation of how such a disjointed potpourri is likely
to be received by your average cinemagoer.
It took Abel Gance a big chunk of his five hour epic
Napoléon (1927) to cover the
same ground, and even he had to resort to some pretty drastic factual omissions.
Likewise Jean Renoir's
La Marseillaise
(1938) takes quite a few liberties with historical fact but it is, for all
that, a far more palatable and involving work than Pierre Schoeller's aimless
extravaganza.
Un peuple et son roi lives up to its insane ambition
with its blockbuster production standards, but beset with a rambling, emotionally
sparse screenplay that fails to bring the whole thing together it feels painfully
hollow.
© James Travers 2019
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Film Synopsis
By 1789, the French were ready to overthrow their monarchy and forge a new
destiny, under the banner of a nascent republic. Intellectuals Robespierre,
Marat, Danton and Desmoulins were the driving force of the Revolution, the
founders of the National Assembly that would oversee France's transformation
from a monarchy to a modern republic. But the transition would be far
from harmonious and in the years following the fall of the Bastille a bloody
reign of terror would be instituted. Those who were seen to oppose the
Revolution would be arrested and sent to the guillotine, a fate that not
even the king nor his queen, Marie-Antoinette, could escape...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.