Road Picture

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LA NUIT DE VARENNES

Directed by Ettore Scola

Screenplay by Sergio Amidei and Ettore Scola

In the coach up ahead, history rides: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their children are fleeing revolutionary Paris in disguise, for a rendezvous with royalist allies from abroad and a last gamble on restoration of their absolute power.

In the coach behind them, humanity rides (or anyway a curious cross section of it). The passengers include weary, white-clad Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni), who now spends his time fending off women rather than seducing them; Tom Paine (Harvey Keitel), pamphleteer of the American rebellion; and the journalist Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault), to name just the historical personages aboard. Among the fictional creations are a lady-in-waiting to the Queen (Hanna Schygulla), Her Majesty's snippy homosexual hairdresser, a widow in need of consolation, a judge, an arms manufacturer and an aging opera singer heading for a small role in the provinces. Some know, some suspect, some do not particularly care who is in the coach ahead. Some will have turned off history's highway to pursue their private byways before the royal flight is arrested at Varennes. A few will be present when the decree ordering the royal family to return to Paris (and eventually the guillotine) is read out to them. All they will see of that historic moment will be the King's shoes and socks, the Queen's skirt swishing this way and that as they pace off their anger and frustration. For the closest the observers can get is a perch on a staircase with the eyes at the level of the royal bedroom's floorboards. That is fine. In fact, for Director Scola's purposes it is the perfect finish to a masterly film, at once superbly intelligent and strangely poignant. He employed the same ironic device in A Special Day (1977), in which Mussolini held a giant rally for Hitler in the background, while Mastroianni and Sophia Loren coped with the quotidian in the foreground. But La Nuit de Varennes is a much richer film. In Day the protagonists virtually ignored the great events moving around them. In Varennes they are relentlessly articulate in expressing views about them, ranging from right to left with a splendid detour for Casanova's apolitical self-absorption and his mourning for vanished elegance.

Scola and his screenwriter, the late Sergio Amidei (whose credits include such neorealist masterpieces as Shoeshine and Bicycle Thief), want to make two points: that Louis XVI's plans were unhinged not by ideology but by a series of stupid accidents; that the ideas and impressions of the travelers jouncing along in the King's wake are blinkered by their subjectivity and their failure to account for history's indifference to the logical linking of events, which can be imposed by hindsight. Only Barrault's marvelously ironic Restif, curious as a cat and just as amoral, has things right. He has a taste for human folly, and he senses there is a whopper in the making up the road. Scola's imagery has a maturity that matches the script's subtlety of detail and simplicity of overall vision. The actors play characters first, ideas second, and they are superb, none more so than Mastroianni, who contemplates age as wryly as once he eyed the opposite sex. La Nuit de Varennes lasts more than three hours, but it passes in a moment. It is only in memory that it lingers -- very likely forever. --By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.