Word: wajda
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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...
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...
...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