Mélanie Laurent, Guillaume Canet on Playing Doomed Royals Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in ‘The Flood,’ Accepting Locarno’s Davide Campari Award
variety.comMarta Balaga Co-stars Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet will receive the Excellence Award Davide Campari at Locarno, dedicated to actors with extraordinary careers. “I would be sad if Mélanie was getting it all by herself, and I would feel awkward if I was the only one.
It’s wonderful that we are getting it together,” Canet tells Variety ahead of this year’s Locarno Film Festival. In their fest opener, “The Flood,” directed by Gianluca Jodice, the duo plays Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, living out their last days in isolation and poverty.
This time, the famous queen isn’t urging anyone to “eat cake.” She is just trying to survive. “They get arrested, and she understands it’s the end of everything,” says Laurent, who “based everything” on Stefan Zweig’s book “Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman.” “She wasn’t stupid; she wasn’t obsessed with partying, but she had a husband who was asexual.
He was nice to her but she was bored. She wasn’t supposed to have any power, and he was unable to lead. They weren’t the bad guys; they weren’t cruel on purpose.
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