Word: restif
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Most of the film's talk and entertainment takes place in a carriage which plunges through the countryside on its escape from Paris, Filling this carriage are a scandalous/novelist/social historian/pornographer named Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault); an aging but still engaging Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni); the dry English essayist Thomas Paine (Harvey Keitel); a sumptious Comtesse Sophie de la Borde, lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette (Hanna Schygulla); and various peripheral caricatures of the aristocracy. The wit, the life-blood of an era contained in one carriage, offer the potential for a rich entertainment, but the result...
...coach behind them, humanity rides (or anyway a curious cross section of it). The passengers include weary, white-clad Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni), who now spends his time fending off women rather than seducing them; Tom Paine (Harvey Keitel), pamphleteer of the American rebellion; and the journalist Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault), to name just the historical personages aboard. Among the fictional creations are a lady-in-waiting to the Queen (Hanna Schygulla), Her Majesty's snippy homosexual hairdresser, a widow in need of consolation, a judge, an arms manufacturer and an aging opera singer heading...
...that the ideas and impressions of the travelers jouncing along in the King's wake are blinkered by their subjectivity and their failure to account for history's indifference to the logical linking of events, which can be imposed by hindsight. Only Barrault's marvelously ironic Restif, curious as a cat and just as amoral, has things right. He has a taste for human folly, and he senses there is a whopper in the making up the road. Scola's imagery has a maturity that matches the script's subtlety of detail and simplicity...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...
What gives the book flesh and weight, however, is not local color. It is the lecherous old rationalist Restif, whose expert portrait by Karmel, in turn, reflects more of the spirit of revolutionary Paris than any neutral reportage is likely to do. Karmel nudges the reader once or twice too often to see parallels between Restif's Revolution and those of modern times. But he has superbly proved his boast that "this is the book Restif did not write but should have." All it lacks is a modest degree of "truth in packaging...