In Danton Wajda cannily uses the French Revolution as a surface narrative for his exploration of the nature of freedom, justice, and true participatory government. It is not surprising that he made the film in exile from his native Poland, which in the early 1980s was suffering a particularly sharp crackdown by the Soviet government. And, while Wajda has denied direct socio-political connections between the events in Danton and the end of the Solidarity movement in Poland, it is hard not to see various analogues, if only on a broad thematic level. It is particularly telling that the film is essentially an ideological inversion of the source material, a 1929 stageplay by the Polish communist Stanislawa Przybyszewska. For Przybyszewska, the story’s hero was Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak), whose determination to maintain the passion of the Revolution was compared to that of Lenin; for Wajda, the hero is Georges Danton (Gérard Depardieu), a rough-hewn man of the people who wanted to distance himself from revolutionary bloodshed.

Like the play, Danton is essentially a battle of wills, with the two ideologues--Danton and Robespierre--representing different poles of the revolutionary spirit (they appear in only one scene together, which encapsulates their mutual animosity and conviction). Although it is not historically accurate per se (the French critics had a heyday tearing it apart much like American journalists ripped into Oliver Stone’s JFK, both mistaking details for essence), it is a sharp and moving distillation of the nature of power and its role in mediating the will of the people. This was particularly crucial for Wajda, who had come of age as a filmmaker under communist rule in Poland and whose films were deeply humanistic treatises fueled by romantic fatalism (particularly his late-1950s “war trilogy”: A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes of Diamonds). Thus, it is not hard to see why he would find his protagonist in Danton, a man who went to the guillotine, perhaps unnecessarily, with no regrets, demanding that his head be shown to the people “because it is worth it.” Like all of his greatest films, Danton is defined primarily by the elegiac mixture of Wajda’s understanding of gritty political reality and the lyrical sensibilities that give his films such unrelenting beauty even in the most despondent of situations.

Because Danton distills wide-ranging political struggle into two opposing personalities, casting was of the utmost important, and in Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak Wajda found perfect embodiments of his central characters. Large, brusque, and imminently likable, Depardieu captures the spirit of Danton, including the fundamental contradiction of a man who reveled in aristocratic materialism and comfort, yet staked his life on being a man of the people. Depardieu channels his physical bulk and proletarian intensity, which plays as counterpart to Wojciech Pszoniak’s performance, which emphasizes Robespierre’s physical slightness and general sickliness that never quite stands in the way of his political ambitions. Pale and frail, Robespierre’s physicality can be read a literal manifestation of his spiritual decline, although Wajda refuses to make him a simplistic villain. Rather, he portrays Robespierre as a powerful intellect with a humane sensibility who nonetheless felt compelled to shed blood if it meant the continuance of the revolutionary spirit. The scene in which Robespierre reaches out to his friend Camille Desmoulins (Patrice Chéreau), a newspaper publisher and Danton supporter, is evidence that Wajda wants us to see him as a multi-dimensional paradox, much like Danton himself.

Thus, the film does not give us easy grounding, but instead constantly challenges us to see each character within the context of both his convictions and the necessities of his political position. As a “man of the people,” Danton felt compelled to put his fate in those who celebrated him, which can be read as either the ultimate expression of solidarity or an ill-fated overestimation of the will of the proletariat. On the other side of the political divide we have Robespierre, who genuinely believed in the power of revolution, but couldn’t let go of it long enough to recognize the need for evolution. In his mind, the same sense of passion that led to the uprising had to be maintained, which can be seen as either a genuine sense of conviction or a misguided lack of foresight. And herein lies the power of Danton, a film that views history through a contemporary lens and allows us to see that the mistakes of the past have powerful ramifications for the present. As screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière puts it, “The past is the foot of the present--it’s always the present time that write the past.”

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection