Vive La France! : The Makings of an 18th-Century Revolution--on Film

For Jane Seymour, the versatile British actress who has played everyone from Bathsheba to Lady Brett Ashley, it was a crowning moment.

The veteran of stage, screen and miniseries was recently in Bordeaux, cast as Marie Antoinette, the Austrian-born queen of Louis XVI, in the bilingual production “The French Revolution.”

In true Cecile B. DeMille fashion, a cast of thousands, including French soldiers on special detail dressed as 18th-Century royal troops and unemployed Bordeaux factory workers dressed as 18th-Century peasants, lined the road as the queen’s entourage approached.

The crowd, which had been instructed to shout insults at the queen as she passed, called out:

“Austrian bitch!”

“Whore!”

“Enemy of France!”

But American director Richard Heffron (“North and South,” “A Rumor of War”) felt there was not enough thunder in the throng.

“Don’t you understand?” he shouted alternately in French and English. “You hate this woman!”

Finally, as Seymour recalled in a recent interview at the Chateau Fontainebleau, where she was preparing for one of the film’s last scenes, the crowd became sufficiently hostile to make Heffron happy.

“But as soon as the cameras stopped and we were making our way back for another take,” she said, “the jeers turned to even louder cheers.”

“Vive la reine!” the people chanted. “Long live the queen.”

Two hundred years after the beginning of the French Revolution, it is clear that most French are fonder of their Austrian queen than they were in 1793, when they cut off her head after parading her through Paris in a tumbrel.

The long film on the revolution, complete with bloody massacres, will have its premiere in October in Paris as a full-length feature film, in French. Later, it will be released in the United States, in English.

The movie cost $50 million and is one of the most expensive European productions ever. All scenes were shot in both French and English, which reflects a growing trend in Europe toward multilingual productions, with English as one of the languages to help pay the costs.

Filmed entirely on location in France, the movie has two directors: Frenchman Robert Enrico and Heffron, an American, each responsible for half the project.

Perhaps because the production coincides with the 200th anniversary of the revolution, when France is again alive with debate over the rebellion’s merits and faults, actors and actresses found themselves caught up in the same contradictions that interest historians.

Were the ideas of equality and the rights of man spawned by this ideological revolution worth the blood and pain they caused?

Was Robespierre a humanitarian or the world’s first terrorist leader?

Was Louis XVI a good-hearted, inept monarch or was he guilty of heinous crimes against the French people?

“Preparing for the part,” said Jean-Francois Balmer, a Swiss actor who plays the king in the film, “I discovered that he was an infinitely more interesting man than what the teachers at school had taught. He was a king ahead of his time, a democrat ahead of his time. I was seduced by his personality. He was clearly more than just a fat king who fell.”

The role of the first king to be executed after a trial by the people was described as a beautiful challenge by Balmer.

“I saw my job as to rehabilitate this king without forgetting his weaknesses,” he said on the Fontainebleau set.

To Seymour, the task of portraying Marie Antoinette was to depict an evolving character, much more dignified in her death than she had been in life.

“I leave her ambiguous,” she said. “In the beginning I play her as frivolous and flirtatious. Then I play her as a politician, taking over the reins as the king-- le pauvre homme --falters. When she is in prison, I portray her as a simpler, much stronger woman. She becomes a good mother. Finally, she is a woman who dies with enormous dignity.”

Seymour, 38, a former ballet student who said she failed her French exams in British schools, managed to perfect her French for the film. Of the leading actors in the film, German Klaus Maria Brandauer is the only one whose voice will have to be dubbed--in French but not in English, which he speaks fluently.

Brandauer (“Mephisto,” “Out of Africa”) plays the difficult role of Georges Danton, the brilliant lawyer, lover and revolutionary leader who dies under the guillotine.

In addition to mastering French for the part, Seymour had the challenge of working with her two children from her marriage to business manager David Flynn, in the roles of the dauphin and his older sister.

The two children, Katie, 7, and Sean, 3, bear an uncanny resemblance to the portraits of the royal children. It was director Heffron who noticed the similarity and asked Seymour to let them play the parts.

At one point in the film, when the execution of Louis XVI is announced, Seymour is obliged to kneel before her son. With the death of the king, he has become the king of France.

Seymour suggests that anyone who doubts the difficulty of such a scene can try kneeling before their own offspring.

She said that several scenes in the movie had to be delayed so her children could take naps. “My role as a real-life mother took precedence over my role as a royal mother,” she said.

“Acting with your own children can be difficult because you have to translate for them, you have to tell them what to do, and you have to be a good mother at the same time,” she added.

Son Sean was sitting with her in the makeup van during the interview. What was his favorite scene in the movie?

“I like when they cut the heads off,” he replied.

His enthusiasm notwithstanding, revolution does not come off too well in this film.

“The great French Revolution was also genocidal,” executive producer Alexandre Mnouchkine observed over lunch recently on the Fontainebleau set. “In some places, such as the Vendee (a region in the west of France between Poitou and Bordeaux), as many as one third of the people were slaughtered. There are certain things that need to be celebrated about our revolution, but this is not a commemoration.”

Heffron, who had to brush up on his prep-school French, said, “It has been a fascinating experience to make a film about the French Revolution during these times.”

Heffron was interviewed at another set, in the Chateau de Maisons Laffite outside Paris, where he was shooting the dramatic wounding of the revolutionary leader Robespierre. On the same night, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was visiting China and Chinese students refused to leave Tian An Men Square in Beijing.

“We are living in the most extraordinary two years of international politics,” Heffron said. “One can hardly believe the headlines. We go to the set and film scenes from the French Revolution, the first revolution based on ideas, and we go to our hotels to watch the real-life scenes at the Kremlin and China. It is utterly fascinating.”