If ever there was an event that had me at “hello” it’s this one. And I’ve been graciously asked to moderate the Q&A following Gianluca Jodice’s fab film, which opened the 2024 Locarno Film Festival on the Piazza Grande.
Fashion and cinema always go hand in hand for me. There cannot be cinema without the visual appeal of costumes and even when the craftsmanship is hidden, it is still palpable for me. The way the characters move, how they feel in their garments is always part of the plot. Try watching a film that way sometime… You’ll be surprised at what you discover. It is for this reason that watching films which feature the costume designs of Massimo Cantini Parrini are always a multi-sensory experience for this writer. And with two recent favorite wonders under his belt — Pablo Larraín’s Maria and Gianluca Jodice’s The Flood (Le Déluge) — this fellow Florentine has been a busy boy!
Later this month, the Ciné Lumière at London’s Institut Français in South Kensington is hosting special screenings of both films, as part of their ongoing series titled ‘Fashion & Cinema’. Past events included special screenings of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and the Merchant-Ivory extravaganza Howard’s End. Both screenings featured special Q&A sessions with the costume designers of each production.
On Friday, the 24th of January, I’ve been asked to moderate the Q&A with filmmaker Jodice, who hails from my mom’s hometown of Napoli, and Cantini Parrini, to talk about their stunning collaboration on The Flood. The film features electrifying performances by French stars Guillaume Canet as Louis XVI and Mélanie Laurent as Marie Antoinette — as you’ve never seen them before. While the royal couple await their fate in the last days of their lives, a revolution is raging outside and will eventually claim their lives as casualties. The Flood, the title comes from the famous sentence attributed to King Louis XV — “Après moi, le déluge,” is a haunting film, which questions the reasons for the bloodshed of executions but does so in a subtle way that gets under your skin and stays there, desperately asking each viewer to find their own personal answer. Was the King right, did mayhem ensue after his departure and was that chaos necessary for the kind of France that exists today or could the bloodshed been avoided, the film seems to ask delicately, without the audience even realizing it.
Written by Jodice along with Filippo Gravino, The Flood boasts Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino as Associate Producer. Jodice directed the documentary Looking for The Great Beauty about the making of Sorrentino’s 2013 Academy Award winning film La Grande Bellezza.
The Flood also turns out to be one of those rare works of the Seventh Art which employs the use of costumes as a central story thread, with Canet’s gentle but clueless King asking his jailers for clean robes, while Laurent’s repeated wearing of the same dress almost takes the audience on an olfactory journey — something which seldom happens in cinema. We wonder about the scent of the powdery wigs and their undergarments, and not in a creepy way, but in a manner that brings us into their controlled terror. We feel what they feel, we smell what they smell and at the end we can’t help but wonder who was right and who was wrong.
The following night, on Saturday the 25th, Cantini Parrini will be back for a screening of Maria at the Ciné Lumière followed by a Q&A with Fashion & Cinema founder Joana Granero Sánchez. “Fascinated by the then under-explored relationship between fashion, cinema and costume design, Joana founded Fashion & Cinema in 2012,” her site’s About page kicks off.
Again, she had me at “hello.”
For more info on Fashion & Cinema, check out their website. And to book tickets for either films at the Ciné Lumière in London, click on their website.