Word: scola
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...bubbly tear slides down his face. A 1930s hard-boiled hero, based on the young Jean Gabin, reappears 20 years later as the aging Gabin's Inspector Maigret. There is plenty of verve here but little charm; the relentless closeups favored by Director Ettore Scola (A Special Day, La Nuit de Varennes) turn every character into a comic-pathetic gargoyle. It is left to the nostalgic sound track to evoke the emotions of a nation as the Na zis stormed in and the Americans took over and the Revolution failed . . . and the band played...
...Nuit de Varennes. Louis XVI's flight from the French Revolution is acutely observed by Director Ettore Scola, who concludes that history is an accident, ideology an irony, humanity's greatest blessing its distractibility...
...collapsed once and for all. The occasion is no less than the climax of the Revolution, a pivotal moment in the story of Europe. The film, though, misses weighty historical drama by a good deal. Relegating the central political figures of the Revolution to the periphery of his film, Scola focuses on a lively troupe of contemporary notables, who talk and romp their way across the French countryside from Paris to Varennes in a characteristically French blend of the serious and the comic...
...Fassbinder mold to a comparably fixed part of decadent and shallow seductress--melting her audiences with a look that oozes sexuality. But if her excesses are intended as some sort of comment on the monarchy, or if the excerpts of serious analysis are intended to be heeded, then Scola has produced a muddled failure. The film's frivolity, if intended as a counterbalance--a light-hearted portrayal of chaos--proves nothing of the kind, with the La-Cage-aux-Folles-type fairy-coachmen who are tedious rather than funny. The fresh moments are all to far in between in this...
...Scola and his screenwriter, the late Sergio Amidei (whose credits include such neorealist masterpieces as Shoeshine and Bicycle Thief), want to make two points: that Louis XVI's plans were unhinged not by ideology but by a series of stupid accidents; 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...