The Reign of Terror has begun, bringing Georges Danton (Gérard Depardieu, powerful) back to Paris, in 1793, from self-imposed exile to oppose former Revolutionary compatriot Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak, brilliant) on the matter of its continuation. Danton arrives by coach on a rainy night. What he sees in the square is a dreamlike, painterly apparition: protected by a cover, the sleeping guillotine, its gleaming blade pulled up to the top. The static quality of nearly all of Andrzej Wajda’s Danton owes something to its literary source, Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s Sprawa Dantona; but it also is correlative to a suspended historical state owing to Danton and Robespierre’s quarrel. Until near the end, when many heads roll, including Danton’s, in 1794, we see nothing of the guillotine in action. Rather, it remains in our mind’s eye poised for use.
Unlike the aloof Robespierre, Danton is a favorite among ordinary Parisians, whose warm reception he basks in as Robespierre watches from an upstairs window. One is gregarious; the other, tight-lipped. One wears his white wig loosely, or not at all; the other fits snugly under his. However, although it might seem that one is more political and the other more (and even insanely) idealistic, Wajda’s film shows a Robespierre who has his own qualms about France’s post-Revolutionary path, even though he is one of its architects—a Robespierre strongly influenced by surrounding colleagues. Ironically, it is the quarrel that Danton brings with him—at one point, in a rage, he takes a whack at Robespierre’s wig!—that seems to force Robespierre into an unbending stance. Wajda sees the animosity between them as contributing more to the unfolding tragedy than either man contributes by himself.
While Danton is being executed, Robespierre hides like a scared child under his bedsheet.
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MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
DAYS OF GLORY (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006)
January 12, 2008French-born Rachid Bouchareb, whose heritage is Algerian, scored a coup with his film Indigènes, which moved then-Premier Jacques Chirac to unfreeze military pensions for soldiers from the French colonies, mostly from North and West Africa, who fought for Free France in World War II. Chirac called what he did an “act of justice”—one marking an important step by France toward (the likely impossible) assimilation of her immigrant populations and their descendants. Such an outcome as Chirac enacted, however welcome, is totally irrelevant, however, to the issue of just how good a film Bouchareb has made. I am sorry to report that Indigènes is without merit as a work of art, although at least it is expertly edited (by Yannick Kergoat) and hauntingly scored (by Armand Amar and Cheb Khaled). As a war film it is simply one cliché after another, with the only really adept passages being those that show combat—a reminder of François Truffaut’s remark that, whatever their intent, all narrative war films end up being pro-war because the actual fighting scenes are always the most exciting.
The film follows a handful of Muslim Arab volunteers. We watch their efforts to contribute to the group effort of the 7th Battalion in Italy and France, and we see as well how shabbily they are treated by their French comrades and the military itself. Bouchareb greatly exaggerates the role that these soldiers played in the French war effort—this, a familiar strategy of propaganda, to offset historical neglect, historical dismissal of a contribution made, by going off gung-ho in the opposite direction. But that’s fine with me. The cause involved is worthy of propagandizing. But off the battlefield this film is feeble in the extreme. We can’t wait to get back into battle.
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