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Frame: The Terror of the Revolution in France. An old Marquis, making a bunch of notes, urged by an affectionate retainer to run while he still can. The Marquis goes about his business as usual, refusing to change his ways. Arrogance? Denial? Belief his nobility, his name, his lineage can protect him from the mob? No. We will learn, eventually, that it is firm belief that Duty is more important than preserving one's own skin. He will be carried away, still living true to this belief, by a mob that is fully justified in doing down the status quo. How did this come about?
1760 something, France. Subversive literature of all sorts saturates the land (sort of). The new class, the bourgeousie of the cities pool their funds to buy political tracts and duodecimo (pocket size) treasonous literature. Some of it advocates the return to a France in which the church is supreme, having the power to make even a seated monarch spend a year in sackcloth to do penance, at the order of the Pope, head of all Christendom. But the Church, like the Church of Sardis in Revelation 3:1, only seems to still be alive. Its power has died already.
Other literature also attacks the monarchy, but additionally attacks all institutions of the past. The Enlightenment writers are a bunch of libertines, looking to revisit and revise all rules of conducts, all structure of society. They sleep around. They're thrown in jail. They waste away from various sexually transmitted diseases. They use a horrific earthquake to justify an appalling belief that maybe God isn't doing anything about his Creation at all. They worship, in place of God, Beauty, Freedom and their friends. They are quite witty, and quite secretive. They generally pretend to be sympathetic to the court in public, while writing in private. They become a lot more conservative when they inherit.
The court and its hangers on, meanwhile, are busy trying to stomp out a lot of fires that persist and spread, threatening to engulf the ever-expanding realm. If it isn't a revolution in the colonies, or another round of natives to wipe out with smallpox infected blankets who nevertheless manage to take out an awful lot of otherwise capable officers, it's another uprising in the countryside, spawned by the actions of corrupt tax farmers.
Meanwhile, in that same countryside, are a few members of the nobility who husband the land, tend to their duty and try to prosper in the midst of chaos. And it is chaotic. Even without the violence, their tenants and peasants within a single province might not speak the same language. Sure, it's all French. But it won't be Parisian French until after Napoleon. It's a brutal world, swept with waves of disease and served by crappy roads. And that's before the Beast arrives.
A few individuals in this world enjoy incredible freedom of movement. They might hunt lions in Africa, or acquire a blood brother in New York (Three Rivers). If a naturalist, they are on speaking terms with names famous even today (Buffon). If one can survive, and attach oneself to one of these individuals, one can escape the destiny meted out to one's entire tribe (de Fonsac rescues two this way; Jean-Francois one. Fat lot of good it does most of them.).
Rome has found dissatisfaction it thinks it can exploit to church benefit in an obscure province known for its wool (how like the original Sardis, referred to in the scripture above). But working with locals is risky; one of their greatest fears comes true. Their operation goes rogue. They are forced to send an operative known to be loyal, Italian, and without ideology, to clean up after the mess, a veeringly brilliant operative with a sharp knife and a profound ability to get very close to her targets.
The mess is bad enough that even the court is forced to recognize it, and send someone of their own to cover it up. It makes the monarchy look weak. It makes the treasonous voices sound credible. An adventurer capable of exquisite fraud is sent to do the work. He falls somewhere between the two Roman operatives: his ideal is the Truth, but he doesn't really give a shit about much else.
There is something so inevitable about events as they play out. The noble mother so willing to sacrifice her daughter on the altar of her political ideals. The ideologically crazed young man who turns out to be quite nutty in other ways as well. Our Fickle Adventurer, who forgets to save his blood brother (and the devil-may-care blood brother who has been seeking death for so long he seems almost surprised to finally find it). The Marquis who is stuck cleaning up the mess afterward, screwed and set adrift by the crown which wants only to prevent word getting out and causing an avalanche of bad opinion.
And in true Enlightened Irony, the church which once gutted the Templars for their cash is gutted in the Frame for its cash. Can this have anything to do with that $110 payout by the Church to the victims of its schools in Ireland? Or the impending payout by that same church to victims of its priests in Boston?
Is our lovely, witty, plush heroine the Republic? Believed dead, but, it turns out, saved at the last possible moment with the assistance of the lost wisdom of a far-off tribe and safely taken overseas?
And what is the title of that book, so cleverly (and possibly anachronistically) bound in red?
Was Mani really the name of his historical antecedent? Or did some scriptwriter confuse Native American with Indian and free-associate an incredibly common Indian name?
Last, but not least, the formal structure. Note the two fights Mani gets into (no, the two significant ones): many against Mani, ended by a nobleman who packs silver bullets to sign his kills. Broken promises and betrayal surround both. Is the frame, similarly, the first part of a two part structure? What would the parts of the second half be? The 1960s, notably 1968, when leaders were killed, packs roamed mad and cities burned? Who was the old king (has he already died?), and can we avoid Giving the Business to the Marquis this time around? Or, inevitably, will those who are trying to protect and preserve, to maintain the land and take care of their dependents, get a real short haircut?
Lush cinematogaphy. Lots of neat commentary involving wolves and our variable and ever-changing perceptions of wolves individually and in packs. Bunch of fight scenes that heavily overuse stop front kicks (but I sympathize with the choreographer. No one's likely to get hurt using those and they look impressive). Bunch of weapons that can't possibly have been correct for the time (what was with that weird bone knife chain thing anyway?).
Not a terrible review, but politically very unsophisticated.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created: January 20, 2002 Updated: November 25, 2002