La Nuit de Varennes: a feel of serendipitous life

The Puppet show (“all the way from Venice”) of “Nuovo Mondo”, the film’s original title)

Dear Friends,

Last night I finally managed to see once again while I was wide awake the brilliant and feelingly alive La Nuit de Varennes, directed by Ettore Scola, written by him and Sergio Armidei (to whom the film is also dedicated), with many other names credited for various functions, the credit omitting only the fertile half-fantasy historical novel on which it is based, Catherine Rihoit’s La Nuit de Varennes.

It’s been more than 25 years since I saw it last. It made an impression I didn’t forget and, with all the DVDs and online movies available, and my watching of other 18th century films, I’ve been longing to get my hands on it. It seems to be one of these really fine films no one with the power to redigitalize finds it worth his while or unrisky enough to remake and distribute (these include Huston’s The Dead from Joyce’s short story and Rivette’s La Religieuse from Diderot’s novella). A kind friend sent me a homemade tape videocassette probably from the same Broadcast on Bravo I originally saw it on, and Jim succeeded in downloading a beautiful copy in French with English subtitles.

What makes it so special? That it’s alive with feeling; the photography, direction, use of actors, scenes seem so unformal, scattered, unhierarchical and free. There’s a genuine feeling of capturing all the serendipity, casualness and indifference of life carrying on (even in its most anguished moments to a few on any given scene), as in the opening scene (see above) still where from an odd angle we watch a mountebank puppeteer play before a crowd the story of the capture and then guillotining of the king and queen. It probably took a great deal of self-control and careful director and mise-en-scene to pull this off:

This feel and point of view of the sheer serenidipity of life is the film’s “the deep compositional structure,” the motivating ideology which affects all its other levels.

It mixes intense seriousness with comedy, tragedy with irony, the numinous with the everyday. The story is a flashback told by the opening puppeteer to whom we return at end: of the night Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and their entourage with Fersen tried to escape France in an absurdly rich carriage dressed to the nines, showing how unable they were to imagine what the life of the average person at all was, or how they would stand out. Famously, they were caught at Varennes and hauled back to Paris. Conventional history would present this act as making visible the king and queen’s allegiance to those outside France willing to destroy the revolution, their planned treachery to all they had been professing to the new assembly (a “nuovo mondo”).

Not this film. Scola presents the event as a series of stumbling events going (as most things do in life) awry, events we don’t even see, but are glimpsed by and told to those travelling to the same place. It’s the cast of characters in the the other coaches that the film focuses on, each of them presenting a type person and perspective on life at the time, the ancien regime, the revolution, and life’s experiences all at once. Now this Scola takes from Rihoit: she chose cunningly.

A thorough 18th century Italian scholar on C18-l, offered his analysis (in the form of lecture notes he uses when teaching the film). I reprint part of these here: He argues that each of the people represents a point of view:

“Casanova in fuga dal suo ospite-carceriere boemo, lo scrittore e giornalista Rétif de la Bretonne, Tom Paine, una dama di corte, una cantante italiana accompagnata a un magistrato, una ricca borghese proprietaria di vigneti nella Champagne, l’industriale François de Wendel. Personaggi storici e personaggi di fantasia in qualche misura rappresentativi …”

[It’s very clear Italian and if you read French, or can recognize the cognates in English, you should be able to make it out :), so we have:]

Marcella Mastroianni as a melancholy aging and wise Casanova, comically inept and impotent, but still full of pride and appetites

Jean-Louis Barrault as the remarkable radical novelist, and streetwalker, the film’s central protagonist (storyteller almost) Retif de la Bretonne, perfect to stand for the movie’s erasures of hierarchies (there’s even a scene with his daughter as his comfortable mistress, idealizing here)

Hervey Keitel as Tom Paine, unfortunately not given enough to do, a kind brave and common sensical presence

Scola, somewhat unexpectedly for a person with strong socialist sympathies, is not triumphant about the “new world” (the name of the film in Italian) that is emerging, and shows us the quiet types (not extreme in any philosophy) will win out, in other words the bourgeoisie.

“Nonostante il titolo, il film è privo di trionfalismo. Il mondo nuovo arriverà, ma il personaggio più simpatico, che ruba la scena agli altri, è Casanova, rappresentante dell’ancien régime, mentre Rétif è un filorivoluzionario poco interessato alla politica e lo studente arrabbiato, che immaginiamo pronto ad alzare ghigliottine, è piuttosto antipatico e viene rimproverato per la sua intolleranza da Tom Paine. Il paradosso del film è dunque che il nuovo che avanza sembra ineluttabile ma in definitiva non del tutto attraente. Ed è un paradosso tanto più singolare in quanto Scola proviene da una cultura politica, quella vicina al partito comunista italiano, che nel giacobinismo ha tradizionalmente identificato un antenato e nella Rivoluzione francese un evento comunque da apprezzare …”

Very important here are the monologues (or sometimes dialogues with a companion character) the central presences utter. For example, the Countess,
Hanna Schygulla as one of Antoinette’s ladies, riding in this separate carriage with one of the king’s gentlemen of the bedchamber; next to her is an opera singer, Laura Betti as Laura Capacelli.

The Countess’s speech is one which expresses why a woman would want to be a court hanger-on: it’s a job, it’s a small income, a place in a respected hierarchy, but something more is needed to understand for the etiquette was severely repressive and the dangers (from sexual entanglements) bad: networking you might say, that’s pressure from families. No this Countess goes on about how she feel secure, how she finds comfort in the routine, in the quiet things she is asked to do and she is one of those who mourn the passing of the ancien regime in the carriage.

This must’ve come from Rihoit’s novel; it’s the kind of insight one finds in women’s memoirs of the era, which I presume Rihoit read; you can find this sort of thing in Chantal Thomas’s Adieux a la Reine or FrancoisChandernagor’s L’Allee du ro, both beautifully meditative accounts of the life at court by a contingent woman (in the second case, Madame de Maintenon).

We also have disillusioned bourgeoise who speaks a religious line and thanks God she never reads any radical books (especially by Retif), but as she talks on we see how cynically and amorally she lives her life. Her voice is so resonant:

Andréa Ferréol as Madame Adélaïde Gagnon

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI we never see wholly. The closest we ever get is to watch through a framed door from a low angle so we only see their feet up to the knees, hear them walking anxiously, talking of their troubles that night — about things like the problem of sleeping children. All the while a mob is outside demanding to take them to Paris. We do see one scene where our friends are mobbed and shaken up.

But mostly we are kept in a mood of detachment.

I liked that, the sense of irony and acceptance of humanity. In this the film did have to me an Italian feel, the sort of thing I remember from the Camille stories a fabliau sweetened. This is caught in all sorts of small incidents made theatrical, for example, the love-making of an interracial couple on the top of the coach:

Pierre Malet as Emile Delage, student revolutionary, and Aline Mess, as Marie-Madeleine, a servant

This is not a historical film in the Merchant-Ivory luxury stile, nor in the Kubrick great painting held frozen mode, but it too has its comforting deep focus landscapes

This is one that we see our coach trundling along with Casanova hurrying on a broken-down curicle and Retif on horse chasing afterwards

And like many, it uses art conventions of the period to evoke the time, among them, the use of a coach as a kind of “ship of life” where all get together on “pelerinage.” This made me think of both Henry and Sarah Fielding’s novels (Tom Jones, David Simple in Search of a Friend).

Best of all are the conversations out of which the monologues spring. The talk is intelligent and incisive, epitomizing though made to feel casual. It reminded me of the talk in Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco.

The film has its flaws. Naturally there is a sex scene where an absolutely naked girl offers herself to Retif while a complacent madame looks on. The joke is Retif is supposed to be attracted to her socks and is more intent on the news he half-hears outside the bed. But on the whole it is less masculinist wet-dream this way than most films of this type (for example, the over-praised Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones).

Scola and his team neither endorse or reject the revolution; rather they nostalgically mourn the passing of the hedonistic pleasures of the old world, what is seen as its secular tolerances, but we are also made to see the irrelevance and arrogance of those on top, their uselessness, not that those who might replace them nor the large groups of people we see incensed (rightly) by poverty, humiliations, exclusion look like they are going to be any more intelligent or fair or useful (whatever that is). We have flashbacks within flashbacks: of Retif writing, of Casanova’s earlier life. We return to the puppet show at the film’s end.

One more grand episode. The Puppeteer tells us this is true history! Grand episodes you have seen.

So the next time you meet someone who inveighs against costume drama’s conventions and the genre, send them to see La Nuit de Varennes. For my part I now must read Rihoit’s novel.

Ellen