Un peuple et son roi (2018)
Directed by Pierre Schoeller

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.

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...