Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
Screen VICIOUS CIRCLE PASSING THE MORAL BUCK VOLKER SCHLONDORFF'S Circle of Deceit is a film based upon a Catch 22. Its own title implies the circularity of its argument. It deals with a German...
...Moslem women raped, Christian families slaughtered in their homes, and burned bodies everywhere - left as warnings in burned-out cars at checkpoints, heaped up with the trash at a dump, scattered around a town square like the ashes of so many watch fires...
...In the overall scheme of the movie, we are supposed to care more about his metaphysical crisis -about the one murder he commits - than about all the other people we see killing each other in the streets...
...At one point in the film, Laschen is sitting at his teletype in the hotel lobby and suddenly bursts out in self-reproach, "Facts...
...Why should someone so reckless about getting killed himself balk at watching others killed...
...Schlondorff adapted the Nicolas Born novel on which the film is based with the collaboration of three other people - Jean-Claude Carriere, Margarethe von Trotta, and Kai Herrmann...
...Yah, they're all facts...
...Occasionally his physical courage seems to splash over into moral courage...
...If the movie can do this, how can we believe that a character in it does otherwise...
...This brutalizes the people of Lebanon...
...Laschen is heading for a breakdown that finally comes when he sees Ariane with another lover one night...
...When she wants to adopt a war orphan, he helps her obtain one...
...Making his way through the shell-shocked streets at night, making love to Ariane as the bullets whiz around her house, Laschen is at first quite a romantic figure, rather like John Reed in Reds...
...They have the quality of a knee-jerk reaction...
...He dashes through the deserted, exploding streets during a bombardment, then goes berserk and stabs a Lebanese to death...
...It never seems to dawn on the filmmakers that the horrendous facts they are dealing with might actually be more than just a way to entertain movie audiences...
...That's how the suffering of the Lebanese came to be treated so insensitively...
...Circle begins in Germany, before Laschen's departure for Beirut, with an intimate scene from his private life...
...It's almost out of character...
...When all the other journalists, including his photographer, pull out because things are getting too hot, he stays behind...
...His occasional objections to the massacres seem unconvincing...
...Yet the film is not really about these horrors with which it confronts us at every turn...
...He also has an affair with an old friend, Ariane (Hannah, Schygulla), who now lives in Beirut...
...This is an obiter dictum from which neither he nor the film ever escapes...
...What the filmmakers are showing us brings on no moral crisis for them...
...Everybody passed the moral buck...
...Volker Schlondorff directed the film, but it was written by a committee...
...Laschen's discontent with his marriage hangs over Lebanon like a specter in the film...
...What they witness as a result is a series of atrocities...
...As Laschen's affair with Ariane continues, he becomes more and more directly involved in the war...
...He divides his time evenly between trying to write his dispatches and agonizing over a letter to his wife...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Yet his behavior at these moments lacks conviction...
...Why should it do so for the film's hero...
...but what I do with them is just entertainment...
...After that he returns to Germany and his wife...
...He's the classic foreign correspondent whose love affairs are set in the panorama of history...
...Twice he is witness to murders, summary executions, that he tries to prevent...
...It deals with a German reporter, George Laschen (Bruno Ganz), who undergoes a personal crisis when sent to cover the civil war in Lebanon...
...It's about the emptiness of its hero...
...He is at home making love to his wife, and it is apparent that they are having marital problems...
...The romance remains compelling, however, only so long as we can keep pushing the corpses and the horror into the background of our minds the way they are pushed into the background of the film...
...Like a lot of committee work, their script gives the impression that everyone evaded responsibility for the decisions made...
...He also resigns from the magazine, walking out of an editorial meeting at which everyone is singing his praises as a reporter...
...When he was stood up against a wall by a militiaman who picked him up on a sweep through the city, he only smiled with cool disinterest...
...It exploits their misery for the sake of a little art, a little Western-style alienation...
...Laschen and the photographer with whom he works (Jerzy Skolimowski) stay in a Beirut hotel literally between the lines, and slowly, by going out at night to prowl the city in the midst of the guerrilla fighting, they gain access to both sides of the bloody Christian-Moslem conflict...
...That's the Catch 22 here, the circle of deceit in which the movie itself is running around...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 6
