Word: wajda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DANTON directed by Andrzej Wajda; Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere...
...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 modern relevance...
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...
...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...
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