No matter what the Polish director Andrzej Wajda films, he will forever be pegged as the maker of Man of Marble and Man of Iron, the fellow who put Lech Walesa on the big screen, the voice of the Polish freedom fighters. His new movie, Danton, is about the struggle between Danton and Robespierre during Year 2 of the French Revolution; Robespierre eventually toppled his old comrade-in-arms and sent him to the guillotine, where he himself died only a few months later. Filmed mostly in Paris, the movie is a sort of FrancoPolish Reds: it aims to make politics entertaining and history melodramatic, and for all its talkiness, it succeeds. Not that Danton has the soothing slickness of Reds. There are no Commie-chic fashions here, no snapshots of life at home with Mr. and Mrs. Danton, no little doggie scratching at the Robespierre bedroom door. In many ways, it's a slovenly film, and its politics are often fuzzy. But there’s vitality in the fuzziness, and humor as well. I’m afraid that this movie is being praised for the wrong reason—not for its energetic portraits of revolutionary hugger-mugger, and not for Gerard Depardieu’s wonderfully muscular performance as Danton, but for what people read as Wajda’s true intention: its political ideology.

When the movie opened in Paris in January, the first question on every interviewer’s lips was the same: “M. Wajda, does Danton represent Lech Walesa and Robespierre Wojciech Jaruzelski?” The answer was always no, but the message was slow to get across. In a laudatory New York Times column last January, Flora Lewis dutifully reported Wajda’s denials and then went on to insist that Danton is “a tangibly Polish film,” that “Polish audiences have been trained by centuries of censorship to see subtle analogies,” and that “because he is Wajda, the director obviously had modem Poland on his mind even as he recounted French history.” But if this Danton is Lech Walesa in a powdered peruke, Wajda is guilty of something close to slander. The real Danton, after all, was among the inventors of the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal (and hence of the Reign of Terror). He is thought to have approved the massacre of some 1,300 political and criminal prisoners in September 1792; he was largely responsible for the execution of the twenty-two idealistic Girondins; with Robespierre, he was the overseer of the hideous and bloody rise of the Jacobins. He was also, as Depardieu portrays him, a spoiled egomaniac, reveling in the bourgeois luxuries revolutionary leadership had thrust upon him. Walesa may have gained some avoirdupois during his year of incarceration, but one doubts it had anything to do with the sort of lusty gormandizing we catch Danton at in Wajda’s film. Would Walesa whip up his loyal legions by yelling, “I am immortal” or “A man like me is beyond price,” as Danton does during the movie’s trial scenes? Walesa’s apparent simplicity has always been part of his charisma; Depardieu’s Danton, on the other hand, is a flamboyant self-promoter, proud of his oratory and quick to remind everyone in sight of the power popularity confers.

Yet he is the movie’s hero. Danton is based on a ’30s Polish play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska, which actually supports Robespierre and his view that the ends justify the means: the revolution must tramp sternly forward, ignoring the death or suffering of a few individuals. Adapted in French by Luis Bunuel’s great screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, Wajda’s film tilts the other way, toward Danton the wine-swilling rogue, who wants an end to the Terror and to the stiff-necked reign of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, and who, despite accusations that he thirsts for power, would like nothing better than to retire to the countryside, there to sup on venison and full-bodied Burgundies and to chase an occasional wench around the four-poster.

The movie begins in the spring of 1794, as Danton returns from his country home to Paris, where breadlines snake around comers. From his gloomy, gray-walled apartment, Robespierre (played by the Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak) peers down at the adoring throng that greets Danton’s carriage and realizes for the first time how dangerous his old ally has become. In melodrama there are usually a hero and a villain, and so here: Wajda has made his Robespierre a vain, sallow priss who wouldn’t be remotely likable even if he were advocating general amnesty and a chicken in every pot-au-feu. Although an anonymous French voice has replaced his Polish one (the movie is execrably dubbed), Pszoniak is a hypnotic actor, a thin, spiteful-looking man with reptilian eyes that seem always to be looking inward, checking responses, monitoring emotions—ruling. He can make his body appear so still and tensely coiled that one comes to think of Robespierre as something venomous, scaly: a serpent of bloodless cruelty and logic.

There’s a marvelous early scene in which this chilly creature asks to meet with Danton—a gesture the rest of the Committee deems distinctly beneath him—and Danton, thrilled, prepares a fabulous repast, cooing over every morsel and sauce, swooning over the wine, the flowers, the decor. Naturally, Robespierre refuses to touch a single bite. The meeting is astonishingly like what Thomas Carlyle described in The French Revolution: “One conceives easily the deep mutual incompatibility that divided these two: with what terror of feminine hatred the poor seagreen Formula (Robespierre] looked at the monstrous colossal Reality [Danton] and grew greener to behold him;—the Reality, again, struggling to think no ill of a chief-product of the Revolution; yet feeling at bottom that such chief-product was little other than a chief windbag, blown large by Popular air.” As Danton grows drunker, he grows more rambunctious, even, in a moment of coarse vigor, daring to muss Seagreen Formula’s perfectly groomed wig; finally Danton refuses Robespierre’s demand that he join the ruling Jacobins and, completely blotto, falls into his enemy’s arms, snoring. Watching a scene like this one, you feel you’ve apprehended a historical truth, the very truth that Carlyle saw: that the enmity which leads one powerful figure to condemn another is rarely a clash of ideologies so much as of personalities.

This is what is transporting in Danton: the way it shows the life behind the familiar events, the subtle backstage ploys and power plays. One feels privileged to see Robespierre rise on tippy-toe in his dainty white stockings to make his big speech at the Convention. And when Danton’s friend Bourdon clears a Parisian hotel for a meeting, Wajda reveals exactly what goes on behind the closed doors of 1794: a revolutionary crapshoot, for instance, and in one black-walled room a stance whose participants seem hopelessly stranded in the ether. Perhaps the most evocative details emerge in Depardieu’s acting. Looking huge and appropriately ill at ease in his periwigs and ruffles, Depardieu pulls off a canny, robust, salty performance. Given Robespierre’s villainy and the sometimes overblown theatricality imparted by the play, Depardieu could have turned Danton into a strapping hero—and the movie into mush. Instead, the actor saves it, letting the audience see how Danton’s endearing virility shades off into bullying and his bravado into preening, how his physicality becomes flatulent and even dangerous—how, in the end, his grandstanding dooms him and everyone who supports him. Letting his big shoulders and hands cleave the air, Depardieu creates a burly, back-slapping figure who could pass for an extra in a Miller Lite commercial, but the next moment he sweeps his head back and raises his arm in an almost balletic flourish, putting on airs beyond any footballer’s ken. The performance is wondrously balanced—stylized enough to pin Danton to his period, yet modem enough to make him seem timeless.

Wajda has always had a way with these big, magnetic, almost handsome actors; one remembers Jerzy Radziwilowicz in Man of Marble and Man of Iron and the late, magnificent Zbigniew Cybulski in A Generation and Ashes and Diamonds. Unfortunately, the director has lost certain other distinctions. He’s no longer the magisterial stylist whose early trilogy (the two Cybulski films and Kanal) was so redolent of postwar disillusionment and claustrophobia. Danton is ugly-looking: Wajda and his cinematographer, Igor Luther, have shot it in dank, washed-out colors, so every red is drained to maroon and every blue to navy. I suppose Wajda is trying for a sort of Reign of Terror palette, devoid of brightness or gaiety: a Robespierre’s-eye view. Surely terror is the effect Jean Prodromides’s shrieky, dissonant score is after; the music sounds like something Penderecki could have dreamed up after eating Mexican. And Wajda’s attempts to stage the surging crowds as Jacques Louis David might have—all outthrust arms and bold symmetries—look terribly awkward. When the crowds roar at Danton’s trial, they roar suddenly, all at once: it’s canned roaring. Trying for an infernal starkness, Wajda has achieved an infernal tackiness. As the roving camera lights on the overacting of the French director Patrice Ch£reau playing the woebegone Desmoulins, or of cow-eyed Angela Winkler as his wife, or of the frothing and spewing thespians who play the gargoyles of the Committee, the screen seems to shrink before one’s eyes: this is Masterpiece Theater acting, shot in Masterpiece Theater hues.

If Danton is far from great, however, it’s thoroughly likable. I just hope people don’t like it because “the director obviously had Poland on his mind.” Anyone who claims that Poland’s situation resembles France’s in 1794, that Poland is in the throes of a revolution at all, is either a Stalinist or incredibly naive.

Of course, Danton is not without its contemporary parallels. The central conflict is the same as the one in so many of Wajda’s films, between the individual and the state he has always supported, between the sanctity of one little life and the call to glorious patriotism—in this case between Danton, the outstanding individual, and Robespierre, whose vision of revolution admits no outstanding individuals. The way of Danton is the way of Western capitalism, the way that leads to heroes and robber barons, great men and great criminals. The way of Robespierre is the way of the East, which leads to the China of Mao and, in different fashion, the Japan of Sony. That Danton leans toward the glamorous individualism of its hero is not to say that it gives Robespierre’s arguments short shrift, for, as Wajda told Flora Lewis, “his arguments are difficult to refute.” In fact, what makes Danton a good political film is not that it says all the right things but that it refuses to. Instead of twisting our arm, as a manipulative political tract like Costa-Gavras’s Missing does, it simply presents the situation and its attendant arguments, with all their contradictions and frayed edges, and then, applying the torch of melodrama, sets them burning inside us.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death last June of a drug overdose hasn’t stopped the cascade of his films. They’ve kept coming, a new one every few months, as though he were still turning them out from some hidden grotto in Munich. in thirteen years he made some forty movies—a record not even the speedy W. S. Van Dyke could match in the Hollywood studio days. Naturally it’s been difficult to get a fix on the man. Now his final film, Querelle, has at last dropped in our midst, and I must say it’s dreadful. But it’s not dispiriting the way the more polished and coherent works of his last couple of years were. These dignified, precisely controlled melodramas (Lili Marleen, Lob, Veronika Voss) seemed the consummation of Fassbinder’s intentions, yet they also felt sapped, wan, empty. What does it mean when an artist is at his worst fulfilling his intentions, at his best failing to do so? The peculiar progression of Fassbinder’s career is a textbook case: what was good about him was always what was unfocused, hard to define, and when his artistry came into focus, his work turned insipid.

Let me say at the outset that Querelle doesn’t fit the pattern of his late years: it’s not polished or controlled at all. Based on Jean Genet’s famous 1947 novel Querelle de Brest, it’s a very solemn and precious-poetic movie, a stylized celebration of homosexuality and murder and bulging B. V.D.s. The film stars that irredeemable American actor Brad Davis (of Midnight Express and, briefly, Chariots of Fire) as Querelle, a sinewy sailor whom everyone finds gorgeous, including his commanding officer (Franco Nero, in a fluid and witty performance), the male and female owners of a gay bar-cum-bordello called the Feria, and a host of smugglers and murderers in the forlorn seaport of Brest. Fassbinder’s purposely artificial sets and costumes are a weird cross between Kenneth Anger and the Village People; the lighting veers nauseously from cabaret yellow to cabaret orange. Every so often, Jeanne Moreau, as the Feria’s madame and the only woman in town, saunters into the barroom and croons a jaunty tune with a lyric (in English) by Oscar Wilde: “Each man kills the thing he loves. Each man kills the thing he loves. Dah dee dah. Dee dah dee dah.”

Querelle was doomed from the start, I’m afraid: adapting Genet reverentially to the screen is a hopeless enterprise. When Genet describes oiled muscles and throbbing groins, he layers them into a dreamy, poetic context that entwines graphic sexual imagery with all sorts of other imagery: Catholic, monarchic, mythological, apocalyptic. Fassbinder turns somersaults trying to get this stuff into his movie—with voice-over narration, with Franco Nero spouting curlicued reveries into a tape recorder, with printed quotes flashed across the screen, Godard-style. But nothing is as graphic as a photograph, and when Fassbinder shows men pulling strenuously at their crotches while poor Moreau stares into mirrors and talks about how strong and satisfying their genitals are (she’s really had some awful roles lately, hasn’t she?), the movie turns smirky and jejune. This is locker-room Genet; it’s all classroom giggles and smuggled centerfolds.

As silly as Querelle is, however, it’s also audacious and searching and alive—unlike the several films that preceded it. They lacked the sort of fertile tumult that made the best of Fassbinder so invigorating. Fassbinder always claimed that he wanted “to make Hollywood films in Germany,” and after an initial flirtation with gangster movies, he became intrigued with American melodrama, particularly the beautifully stylized melodramas of Douglas Sirk: Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life. These were great tearjerkers, thrillingly overwrought, monumental in their banality, heroic in the way they turned chintzy stars like Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone into luminous figments of love and desire. Ironically, Fassbinder could never manage anything like them, not until after The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) anyway, and even his defenders had a devil of a time explaining to the uninitiated what was so great about this German Wunderkind who aspired to something as tawdry as American melodrama and failed to achieve even that.

Calling Fassbinder great is tricky, for he never fit the mold of the great director. In the painstaking, expensive world of movies, he was an improbable creature: the filmmaker as doodler. His works felt like brilliant sketches for the masterpieces that would never come. During his middle period (roughly 1971 through 1979), the sketches became rich and stirring: The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (inspired by Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows), Fox and His Friends, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, In a Year of 13 Moons, and, the best of them, The Marriage of Maria Braun. These were pungent, mesmerizing movies, which despite their obscure plots and semi-coherent politics, often had a mysteriously riveting effect on audiences—an effect not duplicated by the work of any other filmmaker. Fassbinder’s style came out of a mad postwar eclecticism that was distinctly German. Mingled in him were the seeds of Marxism and the scraps of Nazism, the ripeness of Sirk and the austerity of Brecht, the romantic sincerity of film noir and the comic insincerity of camp, the suggestive eroticism of Hollywood and the blatant eroticism of German pornography. For a few short years, he was able to haul all these elements, undigested and often unintended, onto the screen in a high-’50s style that was ravishing. The camera whirled and swooned among colorful chichi and fauvist bursts of light. Characters sat at linoleum tables uttering the most banal dialogue in weird, seductive rhythms that suggested something feral and ominous. Meals became sexual transactions, and sexual transactions became murders and murders meals again. Fassbinder borrowed Sirk’s love of mirrors and windows and doorways to frame his characters, to confine them and trap them or snap curious portraits of them, holding us at arm’s length even when the action reached fever pitch. The effect was subversive and stinging, and unexpectedly funny.

Fassbinder’s stories were Marxist fables, but they weren’t doctrinaire. They presented capitalism as inherently sadomasochistic, and love as a metaphor for capitalism; romance and business alike were power games. In Fox and His Friends, a lower-class homosexual wins a lottery and becomes the darling of the bourgeoisie, and then, as his new friends spend his money, they humiliate him for his crude manners and his ignorance, dogging him eventually to suicide. But Fassbinder’s politics were never predictable. In Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, an elderly woman is harassed by the press after her husband goes mad at work, killing his boss and himself. Her daughter takes advantage of her mother’s sudden fame to make a career for herself as a cabaret singer, and Mother Kiisters turns to some friendly Communists for comfort—only to find that they’re as coldly willing to use her as anybody else. For Fassbinder, politics are a mad clutter, and the truth lies not in ideology but in the complexity of individual people, individual situations.

Does any of this explain what made Fassbinder good, memorable, unique? Not exactly. What finally entrances his audience is not his politics or plot lines or even his luxurious, facetious style. It’s more a matter of tone. In an era steeped in cynicism and hopelessness and yet yearning for glamour, romance, deliverance, Fassbinder managed to combine hip coldness and emotional heat in a way that brooked no contradiction. Essentially, his approach was Brechtian; he expressed his jaundiced view in a distanced, judgmental style that refused the easy seductions of emotionalism—or was afraid of them. “I would not be able to tell a film like Mamie simply, the way Hitchcock does it,” he once told an interviewer, “because I haven’t got the courage of his naivety, simply to tell a story like this and then at the end give the audience some explanation.” Yet Fassbinder wanted to make us feel, feel the way Sirk’s tearjerkers made us feel. And so in his fertile middle period he began to use the mechanisms of melodrama, all the while mocking them self-consciously, removing us from them, so that his films were at once chilly and hysterical. Out of his inability to spin a straightforward yam like the great American naifs, he invented a tone that was impossible, oxymoronic: a Brechtian delirium. He was enraptured by melodrama, he became passionate over it, and his passion, not the passion of his characters, is the emotional fever we sense in his films. Where the devices of melodrama had been used to make us weep, Fassbinder used them to dazzle us. He seized upon the form’s overheated confrontations and pulled them beyond camp, beyond parody. Melodrama still offered intense emotional pleasure, but a pleasure that no longer required us to identify with the characters or their sorrows. Instead, we somehow identified with the filmmaker, with Fassbinder, experiencing the world of his film the way he seemed to, embracing the characters and yet seeing right through them, riding the twists and turns of the plot without being twisted or turned ourselves. Watching a Fassbinder film, one felt at once entranced and regally omniscient. There were few more enjoyable sensations to be had at the movies.

Then, around 1980, his technical skills blossomed. Suddenly, he could tell a coherent story, he could in short make a Mamie— or Written on the Wind. His last several films before Querelle—Lili Marleen, Lola, Veronika Voss—were accessible and forthright and politically convincing; they were super Sirkian melodramas. And they were an awful bore. The question Fassbinder’s final years raises is what would have happened to him now that he had acquired the means to make Hollywood films in Germany. He did his best work exploring his own elusive and disturbing private myths, and the notion of actually achieving his longed-for goal may have scared him. Was Querelle’s haywire experimentation a spasmodic, last-ditch attempt to lurch off in a new direction? Was it an attempt to escape his own mastery? Perhaps only an artist with Fassbinder’s restless mistrust of formula and ideology could have shuddered so at the deadening prospect of perfection.