#486: Danton
A story of how revolutions fail
Initial release: January 1983
Director: Andrzej Wajda
We’ve seen Andrzej Wajda before. His trilogy of World War 2 films made art out of Wajda’s struggling against the restrictive rules of the Socialist Realism movement, officially adopted as The Proper Way to make films in Communist Poland. By the 1980s, his camera became a platform for the Solidarity movement; Danton, his French-language treatise on the fall of one of the French Revolution’s key figures, is a sterling example of Wajda’s use of metaphor and symbolism to subtly comment on how revolutionary power and violence eventually turns inwards on itself.
The film places us in spring 1794; the Reign of Terror is in full swing, with hundreds dying daily. Maximilien Robespierre is a man unmoored, wondering how things have gotten away from him so bad so quickly. Still on the mend from a long illness, he and the rest of the Committee of Public Safety have been increasingly concerned with Danton’s relative popularity and his railing against the Revolutionary government. Robespierre is reluctant to do anything about it, because Danton is popular with the people, and his death would symbolize the end of the Revolution’s legitimacy.
In the end, however, the historical record is clear. After what amounts to a kangaroo court — the bitter irony of the proceedings occurring underneath a copy of Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen left uncommented on — Danton is executed, but before his death he predicts that Robespierre and all the others will see their end quite soon. (He was right.)
Looking back on Wajda’s filmography, it’s not hard to see a throughline of a broadly anti-authoritarian, cynical attitude towards revolutions, and the governments that arise from revolutions. Ashes and Diamonds took a pro-Communist novel and subtly turned it into a critique of the authoritarian Polish government, a commentary on the absurdity of Poland’s fight to free itself from the Nazis simply replacing one oppressive authority with another. Danton in turn is about how revolutions fail; the Committee of Public Safety is essentially a gang of bloodthirsty ideologues who see the guillotine as the only tool to save the nation; Danton himself points out the irony that the very Tribunal he helped set up to facilitate justice is now poised to kill him. The film is a microcosm of the tragedy of the failure of the French Revolution as a whole, a cautionary tale of how revolutions founded on noble ideas can be corrupted by bloodlust and the desire for power.
Danton is a claustrophobic film. It doesn’t try to be a huge sweeping epic about the rise and fall of a revolution, or a revolutionary. In keeping with its origins as a stage play, the film keeps the scope tight, focusing on two men, Robespierre and Danton; it’s a tale of betrayal. To that end, most scenes are either in fairly cramped quarters — the dinner scene, especially — or keep the camera close to the actors, letting them dominate the shot. On occasion he does pull back a bit, the result feeling like a Renaissance painting, but these scenes only serve to heighten the tension in the tighter shots. The score is also worth mentioning, Wajda choosing to go with a rather unsettling soundtrack by Jean Prodromidès that drones and rumbles, sinister and haunting. One particular track plays repeatedly during scenes when characters are throwing Danton under the bus, most prominently during the scene when the committee signs Danton’s indictment.
Perhaps what stood out the most to me was Gerard Depardieu, in his role as Danton. Normally, I dislike him in the films I’ve seen him in; but somehow in Danton he disappears into the lead role, giving a performance that’s uncharacteristically nuanced and subtle, especially in scenes with Robespierre, which at times are positively radioactive with unspoken sexual tension. Far be it from me to praise France’s most famous rapist, but dammit, he did real good in this movie and I’m annoyed about it. He’s larger than life, a role well suited for the 5'11" Depardieu, which only serves to make the thinner, shorter Wojciech Pszoniak the ideal foil as Robespierre. Robespierre is fussy and joyless, a hypochondriac and deeply conflicted in all but one fact: he is the Revolution. If more parodic depictions of Robespierre such as the wild-eyed fascist of The Black Book left a bad taste in your mouth, you’ll appreciate the far more reserved performance here. The dinner scene between the two of them is an incredible moment, really allowing the both of them to bring their characters to full expression, with Danton being every bit the dramatic bitch that he is and Robespierre, icewater in his veins, quietly demanding Danton join his faction.
Danton is not a film for everyone. Aside from a surprise moment of child nudity (a young boy being bathed by his mother, who is trying to teach him to recite the very same Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that Robespierre and company are violating the spirit of) and an unflinching depiction of the actual guillotining of Danton and his friends, it’s essentially two hours and change of a political and courtroom drama, and never quite seems to elevate its characters beyond their assigned roles. Gerard Depardieu puts in what’s probably the greatest performance of his career, but on the other hand it’s Gerard Depardieu. So, you know, pros, cons.
Released in the wake of the Polish implementation of martial law at the beginning of the 1980s, Danton has a lot to say about how a government, even revolutionary government, can oppress its people to the point of self-annihilation, and how every revolution will inevitably eat its own children. Far from being a straightforward period drama, it’s a startlingly intelligent film that, at nearly 40 years old, still holds relevance today.
