Film

...Like Ettore Scola, Greenaway has little interest in the chimera of historical "realism...

...Nor is the revolutionary role of the masses romanticized...

...Liquid Sky New Wave fashion, heroin ("liquid sky") sex coupled with death, and preposterous science-fiction fantasy in the post-punk scene of lower Manhattan...

...But the comic often gives way to a strained and pretentious artiness...

...There are more concessions to Hollywood convention in Baby It's You than in Sayles's earlier work, but class distinctions and social details are well observed...

...the characters speak with such singular, distinctive voices that viewers are never tempted to regard them as mere mouthpieces for particular social and political stances...

...A useful context is thus provided for this dramatic meditation on the Revolution—a reflection that concludes by reminding us that many of the issues raised by the Revolution are with us still...

...But it slowly becomes apparent that he does not exercise as much control over the situation as he thinks...

...The setting, furthermore, permits dialogue to be conducted in an elaborate language of conceit, illusion, and word play which could not issue from contemporary characters...

...The most prominent of the republicans are Nicolas Restif de^la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault), printer, chronicler, novelist, and pornographer, who was the foremost reporter of the Revolution, and Thomas Paine (Harvey Keitel), the outspoken pamphleteer, who served for a time as a member of the revolutionary assembly...

...The unwitting draughtsman thus finds himself snagged in a deadly family intrigue, and is brutally punished in the end for his naivete and presumption...

...The filmmakers have based much of their imagery on the somewhat stylized but familiar depictions of French life found in Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Century painting...

...But the two were recognized, detained by the citizens of Varennes, and, of course, returned to Paris for eventual execution...

...Among the former is the aging yet ever gallant Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni), who regrets the passing of an elegant way of life...

...others enthusiastically embrace the coming of a new, egalitarian order...

...She advances to Sarah Lawrence College and identity crises, and he pursues the glory of Frank Sinatra, lip-synching to Old Blue Eyes records in a third-rate Miami nightclub...

...The Draughtsmans Contract, financed by the British Film Institute and a British television network, is the first narrative feature by Peter Greenaway, who has heretofore been associated with the British "structural" avant-garde...

...La Nuit de Varennes, a French-Italian collaboration, focuses on what Alexandre Dumas termed "the most significant event of the French Revolution"—the capture on June 22,1791, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as they were fleeing Paris toward sympathetic armies in Metz...

...The doomed King and Queen do not appear in the film, so we see nothing of the high drama and spectacle of their capture and confrontation with the townspeople...

...the premises are absurd and the dialogue is as wooden and laughable as a typical porno film...

...Some of the characters deplore the passing of the ancien regime...

...Sharon Ferrell as Hopper's junkie wife, who'd like to have a good time and be a good mother but doesn't know how to do either, and Linda Manz, as the punkish daughter who talks tough to cover her vulnerability...

...But Scola and Amidei have sought not literal fidelity to recorded fact, but a degree of verisimilitude...

...The costumes and setting in La Nuit de Varennes are as historically true as one might wish...

...A lively collage of interviews, news footage, animation, and vintage movie clips (including Bette Davis as a chess-playing Queen Elizabeth and the knight from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, playing a game with Death...

...A contract is signed: For twelve drawings of the estate's buildings and gardens the draughtsman will receive eight guineas and his patroness's most intimate favors...

...Instead, the movie follows a group of travelers—some actual historical figures, some fictional—as they make their way toward Varennes, all the while discussing events of the day and their significance...

...The acting in all roles is superlative (though the part of Paine is somewhat underdeveloped...

...The film incorporates a thumbnail history of the game, while focusing on the politics and personalities of contemporary international competition...

...The draughtsman arrogantly goes about his work, insulting members of the household, issuing edicts to the staff, and taking pleasures with his patroness...

...Everything is open to interpretation and re-interpretation: statements, events, social arrangements, art, and the technique of the film itself...

...This is seen from the perspective of the countess, however...

...For example, the wigs which comically crown his male characters are more copious than any worn at the time, and their clothes are more outlandish...

...The travelers' picnic in a forest suggests the scenes galantes of Watteau and Lancret, the courtyard views are composed like works of the Le Nain brothers, and the shots of peasants in the fields have the look of Millet...

...The artist, believing himself to hold the upper hand, drives a hard bargain...

...Though the artist prides himself on being a truthful man—in art and social relations—he is not prepared to distinguish between surface realities and underlying meaning...

...Such literacy and wit probably eluded English landowners, too, but 300 years makes suspension of belief possible...

...Had the couple escaped and rallied royalist forces, the Revolution might well have foundered...

...As a result, there are no real villains in La Nuit de Varennes— just individuals of various positions caught in the confusing tide of change, some more adaptable and farsighted than others...

...Film lovers who believe cinema can be compatible with literacy will find much to savor in these unusually sophisticated and delightfully pictorial works—each of which, in its own way, urges us to consider the contemporary relevance of past experiences...

...Writer-director Ettore Scola and co-scenarist Sergio Amidei, who provided scripts for several of the best films by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, are clearly aligned with the partisans of revolution, but all sides are represented with humor and generosity...

...The perpetrators of this trendy vision of New York punk are, oddly enough, a group of recent Russian emigres...

...Out of the Blue An Apocalypse Now of the American family—a disturbing, original, and imaginatively realized motion picture from outlaw filmmaker Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider, The Last Movie...

...The Draughtsman's Contract provides constant delights for the eyes and ears, while provoking the mind with enigmas...

...The film is a social mystery thriller, and the action is confined to a magnificent English country estate at the end of the Seventeenth Century...

...Ji Baby It's You The first big-studio movie by talented young writer-director John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna) is about an incongruous 1967 high school romance between a Jewish American Princess and a dead-end Italian Stallion...

...The historical setting permits the filmmaker to model his work after Seventeenth Century painting, especially idealized group portraits commissioned by the English gentry...

...The wife of a wealthy landowner (Janet Suzman) beseeches a cocky young artist (Anthony Higgins) to execute a series of drawings depicting her husband's properties...

...The failure to distinguish between appearances and reality, it suggests, can have tragic consequences...

...But two recent imports sidestep the financial deterrent by limiting their field of vision, and both ignore the imperative of appealing to a youthful audience...

...What's more, he is a propertyless intruder in a world where power derives from property...

...Set a century or more in the past, such movies tend to be expensive to produce, and the most frequent moviegoers—those between ages eighteen and twenty-five—are said to have difficulty "relating" to them...

...One period landscape even figures prominently in the film...

...Commentary is provided by anarcho-surrealist playwright and sometime chess critic Fernando Arrabal...

...His story is a fiction, and is drawn in a highly stylized fashion...

...The film shuns the spurious nostalgia that infects most other works of this genre...

...This film, which seems destined for the midnight cult circuit, presents itself in some respects as a black tongue-in-cheek comedy...

...An Austrian countess (Hanna Schy-gulla), one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, is committed to the monarchy almost as a matter of religious faith...

...The peasants remain in the background of this film, a ubiquitous presence glimpsed toiling in roadside fields or loitering in the courtyards of provincial carriage stops...

...The Great Chess Movie Surprisingly engaging full-length documentary feature about the "game of kings," starring international chess masters Ana-toly Karpov, Viktor Korchnoi, and Bobby Fischer...

...the peasants, who have beheld such exotic creatures only from a distance, do not want to assault her, just to touch...

...Other royalists include M. de Wendel (Daniel Ge-lin), the wealthy owner of foundries in Alsace ("I've actually seen it," he laments, "a workman who just stopped working . . . the most terrible sight I've ever seen"), and Monsieur Jacob (Jean-Claude Braily), the Queen's hairdresser, a twit whose malice and snobbery exceed those of his royal master...

...M. Sauce (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the deputy mayor on whose authority the King and Queen were detained, is depicted as a timorous functionary equally concerned about his obligations as a host and his duties as a revolutionary...

...Memorable performances are delivered by Hopper as a pathetically unbalanced redneck boozer...

...The rabble move into the foreground on one occasion, crowding menacingly around the countess and pawing at her garments...