Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen FROM 'K' TO 'Z' COSTA-GAVRAS, POLITICS, & EMOTION IN HANNA K., Costa-Gavras is out of his depth. Perhaps he shouldn't feel bad, though, since the rest of us are too. Instead of dealing...
...At the end she dispatches each of her men from her life more as if she were working her way through an agenda than working out her emotions...
...Instead of dealing with the dictatorship in Greece or the dictatorship in Chile, where there are clear-cut good guys and bad guys, he has made a film this time about the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...His previous political films were all based on true stories...
...Later, having undergone his own political education in Chile, he is drawn closer to her as a result...
...He might as well have said soap opera, for that's what her story becomes when Costa-Gavras tries to bring his film to a conclusion, a denouement...
...He comes to Tel Aviv to seduce her back to Paris...
...The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not of that sort...
...She has also gotten involved with an Israeli district attorney, Joshua (Gabriel Byrne), by whom she is pregnant and against whom she is defending a Palestinian named Selim (Mohamed Bakri) suspected of terrorism...
...Indeed, it becomes less so every day...
...He at first has a testy relationship with her because he distrusts and resents his son's idealism...
...In the end, the political analysis falls completely to pieces, and pulls down the flimsy veil of emotion in the process...
...Each of these men tries to make his own claim on her, as does, still, her French husband Victor (Jean Yanne...
...Joshua demands of her his rights as a father...
...Victor represents the detached state of mind of Europe, which comes to the Middle East in the hope of ameliorating, but really wants no part of, the conflict there...
...Costa-Gavras has also departed from past practice this time by doing a purely fictitious script...
...Here nothing is clear, least of all who the villains are...
...Both sides have been through suffering so atrocious that they can only appeal to history for redress, and both have been made inhuman themselves by the inhumanity they have endured at the hands of others...
...The events depicted did not attempt to embrace history...
...But to appeal to anyone's conscience, you must first have an issue that is already decided, one upon which the moral faculties can seize because reason has finished debating the issue and has made up its mind...
...The characters are not so much human beings caught up in history as figures of historical allegory...
...Their strength was that they did not extrapolate...
...All this remains a sideline, however, a sub-plot...
...I forget what the first two are, but the third is "melodrama...
...In earlier Costa-Gavras films, the characters have almost no personal lives...
...In Missing, the arrested journalist's father and wife (Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek) do have a story of their own, but even that follows from and depends upon the politics of the film...
...they were, rather, embedded in it...
...At one point when Joshua is giving Hanna one of his frequent lectures on Jewish history, he breaks down her own story into three stages...
...There has in fact been an agenda in this film from the beginning, a badly hidden one that shows through the thin personalities used to veil it...
...Their private emotions and personal relationships have been swept aside by their historical circumstances...
...In a series of films beginning with Z in 1970 and extending through The Confession and State of Siege to, most recently, Missing, Costa-Gavras has appealed to the liberal conscience of his audience...
...In the new film, the director and his collaborator on the script, Franco Solinas, tell the story of an American woman (Jill Clayburgh) who has left her husband in France and immigrated to Israel, where she is practicing law...
...And Selim makes himself into her ward when he is paroled from jail...
...Costa-Gavras cannot resolve her story satisfactorily because the history for which it stands in its shaky fashion is not yet over, or even clear...
...In Hanna K., the characters' emotional lives are the politics...
...Joshua is all Israelis, Selim all Palestinians, And Hanna . . . Hanna is in a peculiar way the land itself, the territory under dispute, mother earth giving birth in the course of the film to a new generation that is illegitimate...
Vol. 110 • October 1983 • No. 18
