Word: pszoniak
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What stands out on the film's surface is the irreconcilable contrast between the characters of Danton and Robespierre. The enormous, energetic, during Danton (Gerard Depardieu) stands worlds apart from the small meticulous, cautious Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak). Danton likes to drink and carouse; Robespierre is an asexual puritan. Yet more important than their personality quirts is what each man represents. Danton stands for mitigation, for human goals over abstractions. He controls for the moment public opinion. Robespierre ironically speaks for entrenched power for Spartan obedience to the revolution. He wields the machinery of the Terror. When these two Titans clash...
...film's urgency, this imparts the slightly bitter tests of propaganda, setting the viewer on the defensive. Wajda goes to far as to cast French actors at the Dantonist "indulgent" and poles as the hard line Jacobins such as Robespierre and St. Just, the film's real villain. Pszoniak even bears an unfortunate though surely coincidental resemblance to Wojciech Jaruzelski...
...Danton is cursed by unconsciousness, then Robespierre, played with icy power by Wajda's fellow Pole, Wojciech Pszoniak, is cursed by consciousness. He knows what he is destroying when he destroys Danton: passion and humanity, the soul of his revolution. But he cannot abandon his purity any more than Danton can abandon his passions. In ordering his rival's death, he knows he is ordering his own; henceforth all mistakes must inevitably be deadly ones, since not even he can live up to the standards of rectitude established in Danton's trial...
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