Back to Back 47 - Vive la Révolution? Too Early To Tell
Comparing films that deal with the Frenchest of all events, la revolution
Danton (1983) - director, co-writer Andzrej Wadja, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière, Agnieszka Holland, Bolesław Michałek, Jacek Gąsiorowski
One Nation, One King (2018) - director,writer Pierre Schoeller
The quip from Zhou Enlai that it was “too early to tell” about the impact of the French Revolution... must be one of the most misunderstood quotations of the last century. Speaking to French visitors in Shanghai in 1972, Zhou was referring to France’s student revolt of 1968, not the events of 1789 and thereafter. But the words fit so neatly into the perception of Chinese statesmen taking the long view that they have assumed a life of their own.
Letter in the Financial Times, 30 August 2017
Yes, yes… we know that famous Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai wasn't really referring to the French Revolution when he said it was too soon to tell what would be the effects of the fall of the Bastille on world history 200 years later. But in fact - even though he didn't mean that - he was completely correct in his non-existent wisdom. It's one of the wisest things a world statesman has ever not said.
Because in fact it is too soon to tell what the effects of the French Revolution are in our time. As the quintessential modern historical event, the ur-revolution (never mind the English chopping off their king's head in 1649), the French revolution is one of the central canonical Historical Things That Happened. Today it's third in the Holy Trinity of historical events which are fervently discussed online by people who don't know a single thing about history, along with Hitler's Third Reich and the American Civil War.
(There's also - snapping at the heels of the French Revolution - the Roman Empire, which we're told the average man 'thinks about' at least once every day. I personally have managed to go three whole days without thinking about the Roman Empire, and even then I was really thinking about Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and the cry "What have the Romans ever done for us?" It could be that most of this so-called male contemplation of Rome is really just half-remembered Monty Python dialogue).
The Revolution even gets an outing from people who have no interest at all in the topic, just as a kind of historical eye candy, as Ridley Scott did just recently in the disastrous Napoleon (2023) - so curious, then, that in 1977 Scott made a fine and substantial drama set in the same era, his very first feature The Duellists. Never mind that Napoleon was a firm ally of Ropespierre at the time of Marie Antionette's execution. Have him scowl with disgust at the atrocities of the revolutionaries and just pretend he wasn’t one. Also, a bit old-looking for 24… don’t they have something for that?
Beyond all the Ridley-Scottian bullshit, the French Revolution is still, and will forever be, contested ground in popular discourse and politically-engaged art. Even those who have zero interest in politics and history like to think about it constantly - mostly, like Scott, in terms of Hot Chicks in Bodices that Unlace and cannons that spew grapeshot.
All this brings us to Andrzej Wadja's brilliant but blinkered historical drama Danton. The closest parallel to this movie is Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) in that it features a bravura performance in the title role, is a closely researched historical drama with scrupulous attention to costume and set design, and contains an awful lot of scenes of men in rooms having intense political discussions followed by a grand mass oratory scene (trial for Danton, congressional debate for Tommy Lee Jones's Thaddeus Stevens).
Both films are also notable in that they are Great Man narratives of history in which the nominal subject of the story - the French people for Danton, black slaves for Lincoln - are largely invisible. Women, common folk and oppressed sectors of the population are spoken for by the men involved in the serious work of politics. Though authentic to the political practices of the time in halls of power, it's one reason why such historical dramas are often shunned by popular audiences. This is taken to an almost ludicrous degree in Wadja's film, where Danton's wife is a stunning model who says literally nothing throughout the course of the film.
Cavils and reservations aside, it has to be said that Wadja's Danton is a marvel of the filmmaker's art. For those who are willing to indulge in his long and impassioned dialogues, again in the manner of Lincoln, the film provides an impressive number of memorable experiences. Above all there is the stunning cinematography, in which Paris appears so cold and austere, as if under the spell of Robespierre's drab monkish spirit, though the wonderful score by Jean Prodromides must also be praised.
The central performances of Gerard Depardieu as Georges Danton and Wojciech Pszoniak as Robespierre are powerful, even with Pszoniak's dialogue dubbed in later by another actor to mask his strong Polish accent. The employment of Polish actors to represent the Robespierre hardliners and Frenchmen to play the "liberal" Dantonist faction led many to conclude that Wadja was sneaking in an allegory to his own homeland, where communist hardliner General Jaruselksi had instituted a crackdown.
Wadja always denied this, but in any case it's interesting to note how much the dramatic duel of words between the two leaders is really free of political concepts anyway, being based rather in the Wadja version on individual tendencies and preferences. No more so than in the famous "My Dinner With Robespierre" sequence, where the personal character of both men dominates the action to the exclusion of all historical political themes. Against whom are you defending the revolution with your Terror? asks Danton in this famous scene. “Against men who grow rich,” says strawman Robespierre, making it seem like he’s motivated by envy of Danton’s prosperity. He could easily have said - but doesn’t in Wadja’s version - from the massed armies of Britain, Prussia and Austria, the armed powers of Europe.
Real political events like the September Massacres of 1792, in which Danton played a major role, are not mentioned, nor is the ongoing war with the Royalist powers. All of this has the effect of making Robespierre's decision to maintain the Terror and the repression a fanatic megalomaniac's choice. Meanwhile Danton is portrayed as a pacifist liberal hero against coercive rule by committee, when he was anything but in reality.
Robespierre's doctinaire fanaticism is symbolised clearly in the scene at David's studio, where he is clad in the ridiculous garb of the High Priest of the Supreme Being, a revolutionary cult he had cooked up by himself. To add to this impression, he directs artist David to 'airbrush' the faces of dissidents out of the historical painting he is working on, a clear allusion to the Stalinist practice of effacing purged non-people from official photos. It's 1984 brought back to 1794.
Wadja's essentially bourgeois vision of Great Man history and his portrayal of a fanatic Robespierre/St Just cabal (all Polish and therefore devious, suspect) set against the decent charismatic Danton and Desmoulins (French, virtuous) are his personal vision, and are part and parcel of the film as he conceived it. For me these interpretations are mistaken, but there is no mistaking the artistry with which he crafted this superb film.
In an article that compares this film with Jean Renoir’s rather fun revolutionary epic La Marseillaise (1938), Regina Janes characterises them like this:
Renoir's film is a romp, and so by association, was the Revolution... [conservative] Burke hovers at Wadja's ear, while [radical] Paine skips along beside Renoir. From a Burkeian point of view, Renoir's popular film gives us the revolution as the bourgeoisie first perceived it, foolishly optimistic, while Wadja's gives us the revolution as the bourgeoisie saw it when they wanted to stop it, pessimistic too late. From a Paineite perpective, Renoir shows us the real revolution, before it was corrupted by Wadja's power struggles and fear, and as it will be again.
Regina Janes, "Danton Does Not Sing La Marseillaise", in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, (1996) vol 25, p.295
In Renoir’s Paris the sans culottes show an ahead-of-their-time feminism of which Renoir approves but which was later closed down by the bourgeois reaction and the Napoleonic counter-revolution. Janes notes that Wadja's Danton, made 45 years later, erases the female roles almost completely, working as he is from a female author's source material which gives the women some prominence. Janes suggests that this erasure of women in the story is a natural consequence of Wadja’s “Great Man” theme, and if so, the next film will confront that tendency head-on by giving the great men a secondary role to the sans culottes women of Paris, as well as their working-class male partners and relatives.
— INTERMISSION —
the blade of the guillotine is sharp
the blade of the guillotine is heavy
the blade falls of its own accord
once the lever is pulled
the rest is history
and gravity
united
Writer-director Pierre Schoeller has chosen to make a partly-documentary style, partly-symbolic trip through the iconic events of the ancien regime and its downfall through a series of moments shot through with charged images conveying the birth of a new era. Dreams of the King’s ancestors haunt him; the sun seen as the image of a blob of molten glass in the furnace then shines out over the people as the light-occluding Bastille is demolished.
It's not perfect, but it is a brave attempt to do something fresh and original with the genre of the historical drama. The film aims to show the reign of Louis XVI (Laurent Lafitte) and Marie-Antoinette (Maëlia Gentil) as the very last gasp of the medieval world, in which kingship was a mystical bridge between the sacred world of God and the profane world of humanity. This is why it opens with the ceremony in which the king humbles himself on Maundy Thursday to wash the bare feet of homeless orphan children.
A modern person would say, what's the use of washing homeless people's dirty feet only on one day? Why not find them a place to live and give them shoes? That's why absolutist monarchy is a relic of the medieval mind: it's not the king's job to get shoes or homes or solve social problems. His function is to channel Godly power into the social hierarchy. The Revolution is the precise moment when that way of thinking collided so violently with the modern ‘liberal’ way, created by the Enlightenment.
If Louis had gone all liberal like a good boy he would never have lost his life, but his had to be the head anointed with holy chrism oil from Jerusalem to conserve the mystique of kingship. That mystical connection is what counted for him, not his real flesh and blood people. That’s why he scowls so sourly on an orphan boy who dares to speak to him. That's why that anointed head needed to roll.
The film does follow some characters, but these are thinly sketched archetypes of the sans culotte working-class revolutionary. It's like a Brechtian distancing effect, where characters like Uncle (Olivier Gourmet), Françoise (Adèle Haenel) and Basile (Gaspard Ulliel) play their thematic role as voices of their class, while Robespierre (Louis Garrel) and Marat (Denis Lavant) articulate the political arguments that guide them.
But for better or worse, Brechtian ideas of narrative are practically dead today, and the resulting mismatch of schematic approach to story with conventional historical staging and costuming, along with the seriousness of the film’s treatment of a political theme that isn’t based in American liberal obsessions, makes the film look unbearably stilted to modern audiences. But it’s just working in a different non-naturalistic way. This, along with the historical subject matter, is why it was met with such groans of boredom among the historically-limited Anglo critic clique and the few English-speakers who watched it. But it’s far from boring if you’re alive to the political passions of revolutionary France and after.
The director attempts to replace traditional character-based narrative devices with iconic dynamics, working on a Jungian level of subconscious perception of symbolism. For example, an early sequence has the king portrayed as Sun, and a dream sequence sees the king in a vision-conversation with his predecessor, Louis XIV the Sun-King.
It's comparable to the way that Panos Cosmatos in Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) or Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump in A Field in England (2013) use symbolism to drive the narrative onward, trusting in the viewer to feel rather than think the way ahead in the story. This style is profoundly out of step with the “tell, don’t show” orthodoxy of wordy contemporary Hollywood, where all implications of the story need to be spelled out in crushingly literal detail through dialogue, screen crawl or voiceover.
Nevertheless, this emblematic approach is an exciting and thought-provoking way to see history, and makes One Nation One King an excellent watch for an exploration of just why this Revolution shook the world like no other before or since.