Synopsis
Marguerite & Julien (Marguerite et Julien, 2015) is a French historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Valérie Donzelli, it draws from a true incident in Norman history: in 1603, a nobleman's son and daughter named Julien and Marguerite de Ravalet were executed for an incestuous affair. Anaïs Demoustier and Jérémie Elkaïm play them from childhood inseparability to a manhunt across the French countryside.
The screenplay sat unproduced for decades — Jean Gruault wrote it in the 1970s for François Truffaut, who never got to make it. Donzelli took the long-dormant script to Cannes in 2015 and brought to it something Truffaut's version might not have had: deliberate anachronisms that push the sixteenth-century story out of the period-piece frame and into something darker and stranger. History as fairy tale. Fairy tale as trap.
Demoustier and Elkaïm had already made Donzelli's Declaration of War together, so the intimacy between them doesn't need to be constructed — it's just there. The film doesn't moralize. It follows two people headlong down a path that was always going to end only one way. Stream Marguerite & Julien online on iFILM.
Starring
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