Brilliantly conceived by longtime collaborators of Vittorio de Sica, cast with leading players for Marcel Carne, Federico Fellini and Martin Scorsese, this literally glowing film is a "restive" update of the era of Beaumarchais and the setting of his "Figaro," which directly inspired Renoir in Rules of the Game. Barrault and Mastroianni, with Keitel, discuss not only the events they observe (as has been mentioned) they discuss the unsettled and unsettling progress of liberty and liberation as figures of enormous note, themselves, to liberation literature and ancien regime manners, projecting sensibilities as actors we had admired in them for as much as 40 years. An authority of temperament in these players to portray their characters, including also Hanna Schygulla and those in superbly characterised parts like Pierre Malet's student, is so redundantly embedded in the scenario and production, under Scola's direction, that it is not only tempting but necessary to welcome this film as the descendant also of Les Enfants du Paradis. Imagine a coachful of radicals and fugitive aristocrats, almost as endangered (and sometimes, reciprocating) as Ford's odd lot in "Stagecoach," in an accidental salon furnishing a literal tour d'horison, externally, of the upheavals of revolution they discuss with the animation of their own convictions and reservations, within. From the moment the coach all but collides with Casanova's in an opening scene, this film concentrates in the mind two apprehensions of finality on parallel tracks, while two naive regimes careen together into history in the same reel -- the "age of conversation" of the Enlightenment in France, and the age of humanism in western European cinema. As a testamentary work it should be viewed with "Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir" and "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams," yet without the concordance of footnotes which younger viewers might need for these films. "La Nuit" wears its authority visibly and openly collegially, but very much to the same radiant effect.
Review of That Night in Varennes
