LA NUIT DE VARENNES is a multi-color, multi-costume pageant of one of the most famous days in French history--the moment in 1791 when Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette and the whole French monarchy collapsed once and for all. The occasion is no less than the climax of the Revolution, a pivotal moment in the story of Europe. The film, though, misses weighty historical drama by a good deal. Relegating the central political figures of the Revolution to the periphery of his film, Scola focuses on a lively troupe of contemporary notables, who talk and romp their way across the French countryside from Paris to Varennes in a characteristically French blend of the serious and the comic.

Most of the film's talk and entertainment takes place in a carriage which plunges through the countryside on its escape from Paris, Filling this carriage are a scandalous/novelist/social historian/pornographer named Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault); an aging but still engaging Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni); the dry English essayist Thomas Paine (Harvey Keitel); a sumptious Comtesse Sophie de la Borde, lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette (Hanna Schygulla); and various peripheral caricatures of the aristocracy. The wit, the life-blood of an era contained in one carriage, offer the potential for a rich entertainment, but the result is an uneven and tedious sequence of quarrels and flirtations, the names and costumes of history failing to conceal the mediocrity of this entertainment. As Casanova admits at one stage: "The old man didn't take your breath away, but his name, his reputation, his past," Restif's entertaining and informing role as the film's guide-the Fool who lives by his wits--offers an irony typical of the treatment as he describes a foray into a Paris brothel, only to be interrupted repeatedly by queries about the latest news. But the real highlight is Mastroianni, as the decaying Casanova combines, a grotesquely made-up decaying body with a still seductive charm. He is grandly impotent, self-mocking and proud, a magnetic presence in the midst of a cast of predictable caricatures. The mix does produce poignant moments, as when the carriage briefly unfolds its characters at a hill and they start singing Don Giovanni in the misty woods, and when Restif and Casanova combine their charisma and wit to melt the hearts of each woman in the carriage in turn.

BUT THESE brightnesses are exceptions to a general flow of indistinction. The attempts at serious discussion of the social and political implications of the Revolution would be better left out, as would the character of Tom Paine, who speaks essays rather than conversation. Hanna Schygulla, as the Comtesse, has gone from the cold severity of her Fassbinder mold to a comparably fixed part of decadent and shallow seductress--melting her audiences with a look that oozes sexuality. But if her excesses are intended as some sort of comment on the monarchy, or if the excerpts of serious analysis are intended to be heeded, then Scola has produced a muddled failure. The film's frivolity, if intended as a counterbalance--a light-hearted portrayal of chaos--proves nothing of the kind, with the La-Cage-aux-Folles-type fairy-coachmen who are tedious rather than funny. The fresh moments are all to far in between in this frankly boring and undistinguished film; only ardent Mastroianni enthusiasts or connoisseurs of 1790s French fashion will come away from La Nuit de Varennes satisfied.