Word: wajda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Danton the latest film by Andrzej Wajda (Man of Iron), sees the upheaval from the moderate perspective. Wajda retells the familiar story of Georges Danton, a popular Parisian killed by the revolution he helped create. Danton's attempt to slow down the ruthless waging of the revolution threatened Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, who engineered his execution. But as Danton predicted, the Committee's end was also imminent...
...Return of Martin Guerre brings vitality and commanding presence to his character standing both figuratively and liberally above the Phrygian bone tied revolution Aries who surround him. His gruff manner endears, while Pszonisk's formality chills. One sees easily why crowds would flock to the moderate Danton. Still, Wajda makes clear the appeal of authority; Robespierre offers an ideal worth living and dying for and losses into the deal the coercive force of the guillotine...
...Wajda constructs the contest of the duel between these two remarkable men with admirable skill. He sticks closely to historical detail, even mentioning Robespierre's illness in the month prior to Danton's return to Paris and using Robespierre's actual words in the deruncistory speech he delivers before the Convention. Only rarely does his scene setting tend toward excess or degenerate into same dropping as in Robespierre's visit to the studio of Jacques Louis David, where the great artist is finishing his famous "Death of Marat...
Even more important than actual historical reproduction is Wajda's ability to capture the feel of the age the grime of street life and bread lines, the sense of urgency haunting politicos on all sides of the spectrum, and the pervasive paranoia of a society in lethal flux. Wajda brings forth all the weapons in this director's arsenal, from a droning soundtrack to claustrophobic camerawork, to brilliant contrast between dark night and the torches of the security police. He succeeds masterfully in conveying the dreadful anxiety of living in a totalitarian regime. For if the government of the Terror...
...Wajda has said that Danton represents the West today, Robespierre the Stalinoid East. The film may even be a more intimate parable. Perhaps Danton is Lech Walesa, Robespierre General Jaruzelski. Certainly it shows revolutionary politics to be, as one French intellectual commented, "a pact with death." But however one reads it, Wajda's is a film of high dramatic power, at once a mature study of the revolutionary mentality and an absorbing intellectual spectacle. -By Richard Schickel