Word: danton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DANTON directed by Andrzej Wajda; Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere...
...rain pours down relentlessly, and the guillotine, disused for a blessed day, stands shrouded in black as the carriage rolls past it. Inside, Georges Danton, self-absorbed as usual, pays scant heed to the instrument with which in a matter of weeks he will find more intimate acquaintance. On this same grim morning in the winter of 1793-94, Maximilien Robespierre, whose health (and humanity) has been virtually consumed by the revolutionary fever that has burned within his puritanical soul for a lifetime, reluctantly awakens. He knows that with the return to Paris of Danton, once a colleague in revolution...
...Danton scandalized the French left when it opened in Paris this year. This was partly because of its iconoclastic view of the title character, partly because it invests Robespierre with a complex intelligence that makes him more sympathetic than history generally has him. In a sense, though, that controversy is the least important aspect of the film for non-French viewers, who can afford a certain objectivity about another country's heroes and antiheroes. They can see the principal figures as Director Wajda does, not so much in a historical landscape as in a moral one that has powerful...
Revolutionaries fall into two main types: the romantic and the quasi-religious zealot. Danton, as envisioned by Wajda and Writer Jean-Claude Carrière (Buñuel's sometime collaborator) and brilliantly portrayed by Gérard Depardieu, is the former. Lazy, sensual and, above all, egocentric, he believes that he need do nothing but raise his famed orator's voice in order to bring the people to the counterrevolutionary barricades. Convinced of his own star qualities, he neglects to look back to see if anyone is actually following him or, despite warnings, to take practical steps...
Alas, these minor revelations-and two marvelously vigorous films from old masters, Italy's Ermanno Olmi (Camminacammina) and Poland's Andrzej Wajda (Danton)-were not enough to keep businessmen and journalists from grousing, as they lolled for a fortnight in one of the world's lushest garden spots. Nor will a disappointing festival keep these congenital optimists from returning next year to this bunker on the Côte d'Azur. - By Richard Corliss