Day 17. En Peuple Son Roi (2018)

Un Peuple et Son Roi

Trailer

https://youtu.be/0E5wFOVtxHk

Available Kanopy (some regions) & Amazon Prime

Film Title

Un Peuple et Son Roi

English Title

One Nation One King

Year

2018

Director

Pierre Schœller

Synopsis

Paris, 1789.
The Bastille has been stormed and a breath of liberty blows through the streets of Paris. Françoise, a young washerwoman, and Basile, a drifter without a family or name, discover the unique exhilaration of love and revolution. Together with their friends and the people of the working-class districts of Paris, they begin to realise dreams of emancipation in a newly formed assembly where they witness, with both hopes and doubts, the creation of a new political system. Within their debates and the fury on the streets, lies the fate of their once sacred king and the birth of a republic. Freedom has a story.

Honours/Awards

César Awards 2019

• Nominée Best Costume Design (Meilleurs costumes), Anaïs Romand
• Nominée, Best Production Design (Meilleurs décors), Thierry François

Lumiere Awards 2019

• Nominée, Lumiere Award Best Cinematography (Meilleure image), Julien Hirsch

Adèle’s role

Françoise, a young laundress.

Filming

In search of a large esplanade in order to film there first the people's rebellion on the Place de la Bastille, then to install a guillotine there, production moved to the Ax Major, in Cergy. A large amount of sand was spread over the huge square, and a large green background was installed to hide the Belvedere tower and to be able to show an 18th century Parisian decor instead. The filming took place in Cergy for almost ten days in suffocating heat, after several days spent upstream at the Château de Vigny.

Excerpts from reviews

As with other films with an ensemble cast, reviews of the film do not comment on the performances of individual actors.

This film was generally panned by critics and it is reported to have cost US $19million to make, but the box office taking in France was US$2.5million. The income outside France cannot have been too substantial, in particular with reviews headlined: “One Nation, One King review—Bum-numbing history lesson for Marie Antoinette haters” (The Guardian UK).

Adèle is mentioned (favourable, of course!) in one review:

“The supposedly tragic death of one of the characters only serves to underline just how little we as an audience care for the people onscreen, despite the energy and hard work of performers such as Haenel, who perhaps comes closest to moving the audience in a confrontation with Lafayettee. However, most of the time, Schoeller seems more interested in details like making sure the many songs that are sung are historically accurate—unlike in, say, Les Miserables—rather than in making audiences care about what happens to any of the characters or the country they live in.”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/one-nation-one-king-review-1140793

Comments

The first time that I watched this film I found it rather dull, with the scenes Adèle was being among the few saving graces of the film. Other things I enjoyed were seeing other actors that Adèle has worked with in other films share the screen with her here. Céline Sallette and Noémie Lvovsky were with Adèle in L’Apollonide (2012), and Olivier Gourmet was in La Fille Inconnue (2016). Izïa Higelin is in this film as Françoise' best friend. Director Catherine Corsine (Trois Monde) directed Izïa in La Belle Saison (recommended viewing) in the role that Adèle was originally been attached to play.  Un Peuple et Son Roi is, I believe, the biggest budget film that Adèle has appeared in, but certainly not the most successful.

Before watching the film a second time, I listened to season 3 of the Revolutions podcast: ‘The French Revolution’ by the fabulous podcaster Mike Duncan (Mike’s History of Rome podcast is also highly recommended listening for expanding your knowledge of history more generally). The podcast gave me some understanding of the revolution, its causes, and major events. Previously I had only a very sketchy knowledge of the French Revolution. (I chose to study sciences, so I missed out on so much history, and I am now trying to fill the gaps using podcasts).

When I watched the film for a second time, armed with a better knowledge of the history, I found it much more enjoyable. The many speeches are still not great cinema, but an understanding of, for example, the Women’s March on Versailles made the film much more accessible to me and more enjoyable to view.

Excerpts from article: Adèle Haenel: "I often do things backwards"

“Un Peuple et Son Roi is a great choral and historical film, a rare genre in the cinema. Is that what attracted you?
Adèle Haenel: Yes. When Pierre Schœller called me for this role of washerwoman, I realized how lucky I was to participate in a project of such scale. It's crazy to say that we're going to play the French Revolution. Especially with a filmmaker as precise in his reconstruction of the time and in his way of telling the construction of laws. His film is singular, and what has always interested me in cinema is live and courageous projects, taking risks.

These are themes that appealed to you, too?
Adèle Haenel: Completely. Although the film was anchored at the end of the 18th century, it speaks of today. I also found it interesting to understand how, through mobilization, a people is constituted and how politics resonates emotionally in each of us. There was also the issue of women. It is important to give them back their place in history, and the film does it. Their march was essential during the Revolution, it was they who demanded the return of the king to Paris. At the time, they already asked to have a political voice. What I still find essential today.”

https://www.femina.fr/article/adele-haenel-je-fais-souvent-les-choses-a-l-envers

Un Peuple et Son Roi: Adèle Haenel & Céline Sallette talk about women in the revolution

[Turn on captions and select auto translate into your preferred language.]

https://youtu.be/ksDqPlXVBro

Rewatch Notes

Adèle is truly beautiful in this film and the cinematographer shows her to be as beautiful as she is. The scene when she is sitting at the window in the sunlight is stunning—it almost looks as if the light is radiating from her. All the performances are good, but the pace of the film and the many (many!) speeches become tedious. I can see the desire to show the passion and the debate at the National Assembly, but it feels like someone should have tapped the director on the shoulder and suggested the "less is more" approach when editing. [But hey, what do I know? He's a top professional in French cinema and I'm not.]

Given it is an ensemble cast, Adèle gets a fair amount of screen time. She is second in the credits—I'm not sure why the Gaspard Ulliel got higher ranking than Adèle...maybe a pushier agent?

Adèle's acting, as we have come to expect, is superb. She portrays the loss of a child, the birth of a child, a politically active feminist, and good friend. Her acting ability is astounding and it means I will watch every film that she is in. 

I liked the singing of (apparently) authentic revolutionary songs—Céline Sallette has a great voice, as do Adèle and Izïa Higelin. [Izïa Higelin, known by her stage name Izïa, is a rock singer and guitarist, in addition to being an actress! As I commented yesterday, talents are most definitely evenly distributed...]

A minor aspect that I liked watching were the glass blowing sequences. This is a very cool skill. I have trained (but have never worked) as a patissier and one unit (12 weeks) was "Model Sugar-based Decorations". It was really difficult, but really cool, to work with molten sugar and blow spheres and make ribbons, straws, and flowers. It is a truly bizarre skill to have, and one I am unlikely to ever use, but it does give me deep respect for those who work with materials, such as glass and sugar, on the margins of solid and liquid.

Adèle is great in the film and I'll watch it again sometime, but it is not in my list of 'top 10 Adèle Haenel films'.