Cinema: Revolution As a Performing Art

DANTON directed by Andrzej Wajda; Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere

The rain pours down relentlessly, and the guillotine, disused for a blessed day, stands shrouded in black as the carriage rolls past it. Inside, Georges Danton, self-absorbed as usual, pays scant heed to the instrument with which in a matter of weeks he will find more intimate acquaintance. On this same grim morning in the winter of 1793-94, Maximilien Robespierre, whose health (and humanity) has been virtually consumed by the revolutionary fever that has burned within his puritanical soul for a lifetime, reluctantly awakens. He knows that with the return to Paris of Danton, once a colleague in revolution—now his mortal enemy—he must begin his final struggle, not just for power in the new, terror-ridden French Republic, but for posterity's good regard as well.

Danton scandalized the French left when it opened in Paris this year. This was partly because of its iconoclastic view of the title character, partly because it invests Robespierre with a complex intelligence that 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 to organize potential supporters. Less interested in acting decisively on history than in acting in it, he becomes the unnamed co-conspirator in his own destruction. Arrested and placed on show trial before a revolutionary tribunal, he refuses to fight or flee, since he is unable to resist a performer's apotheosis: a public defense of his life and opinions in a courtroom.

If 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.