Andrzej Wajda's French-Polish co-production is quite a triumph of mise-en-scène. There is quite a lot to triumph over, too. The history lesson chewed over here has that dutiful and drudgy quality of a freshman fixture on the college curriculum, with none of the imaginative liberties taken in, say, La Nuit de Varennes -- to cite a nearby treatment of a nearby slice of history. And for those inclined to snoop below the surface, the Polishness of the director, and of much of the cast, further muddies the motivation. (Parallels, of course, to the situation in contemporary Poland have been sought and found.) The talk, talk, talk needed just to get the facts and faces straight is yet an additional burden. And in an otherwise credible and creditable cast, the focal figure of Gerard Depardieu lends to the title role an air of temperamental rock star-ism or street punk-ism. But none of this is really lethal. And the production, meanwhile, is unimpeachable, with no sense of ill-fittingness or discomfort about the wigs and costumes, and at the same time no sense of parade and expenditure of the sort that tends to inform Hollywood period pieces, and tends to rule out a feeling of everydayness. And Wajda's staging, though a bit crimped by the talkiness, has a marvelous gummy elasticity, stretched still further with suggestive use of off-screen space. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd