GUERRILLAS WITHOUT IDEAS
Denby, David
In The Sleeping-Car Murders, Costa-Gavras's exciting if rather conventional first movie, the hero was a Parisian detective desperately trying to solve a "perfect" murder. With the hindsight...
...getting at the criminal, violent, hidden reality and bringing it to light is the moral passion animating all of CostaGavras's work...
...Is it naive for a moviegoer to want to know what these middle-class, educated, glamorous young leftists stand for...
...With the hindsight provided by three films, we can see that for Costa-Gavras the detective's desire for truth was not merely a convention required by a popular movie genre...
...The Confession used Artur London's memoirs to expose the truth behind the Slansky show trials, demonstrating with extraordinary precision the steps by which a stolidly idealistic Czech Communist was forced to make a false confession of treason...
...Once the Tupamaros (the Uruguayan urban guerrillas) have captured him and begun their interrogation, the movie relentlessly piles up the data that will justify his execution...
...still, it would be a sour irony if this antiauthoritarian were drawn to authoritarianism again and again because it's the only subject that allows him to make an exciting movie...
...For us, too, fraud appears to be the essence of modern government...
...In Z we followed the exploits of a zealous investigating magistrate (played by Trintignant) as he penetrated the shadow world of fascist manipulations during the assassination of Lambrakis in Salonika in 1963...
...Later, our familiar satisfaction with the heroic gravity of his face and chin and shoulders reMOVIES inforces the paradox that a humanly attractive man may be despicable, too, and affords his death a tragic dignity it woudn't have had with a less likable actor...
...instead, they are men acting professionally in ways that we all must act simply to exist as citizens...
...Nevertheless, despite Costa-Gavras's stance of skepticism, his tableaux of political life are marked by a certain artistic and personal naivete...
...In The Sleeping-Car Murders, Costa-Gavras's exciting if rather conventional first movie, the hero was a Parisian detective desperately trying to solve a "perfect" murder...
...What they will do once they have built a strong movement or taken power...
...he has no interest in the personality's lies and evasions, not even as they pertain to political belief...
...0 MOVIES...
...Given the nature of the modern state, we probably shouldn't be surprised if this is the case...
...Take the Tupamaros...
...In order to construct a dossier on the effects of imperialism on a LatinAmerican country, he recreates an entire society—police, parliament, revolutionaries, newspapermen, etc.—and with overpowering emphasis throws tons of material at us—testimony, speeches, reporters' questions, fascist brutalities, etc...
...he's not very interested in political ideas either...
...The world set out in these movies is totally without ambiguity, consisting as it does of only two sets of phenomena: lies and corruption on the one hand, truth and honor on the other...
...God knows, Franco Solinas's screenplay doesn't help him very much...
...and now, in State of Siege, Costa-Gavras examines the case of Dan A. Mitrione, a "generous American" and official of AID who was kidnapped and executed by guerrillas in Uruguay in 1970—a man who was given a state funeral as a friend of the Uruguayan people, and whose actual job was to teach the police how to use provocation and torture to suppress political insurgents on the Left...
...It's more than anyone can absorb at one sitting, and since we aren't given the time to sort it out or think about it, we begin to blank out...
...This is a long, noisy exhaustingly garrulous movie, with a relentless "public" focus, and it finally becomes obtuse...
...Per haps a certain degree of character streamlining is necessary in movies of this sort, but it's still a major artistic weakness...
...Montand's presence gives the film what little moral density and ambiguity it has...
...I don't imagine he suffers any doubts about his own ability to possess the truth or to use it, but so far Costa-Gavras has only displayed a journalist's truth (nothing to be sneezed at), not an artist's...
...For Costa-Gavras the virtue of the Tupamaros is apparently guaranteed by the relative humanity and sophistication of their techniques, and here one is inclined to suspect him of special pleading...
...THE look of political violence and the howtodo-it aspects are clearly what interest CostaGavras the most—how an interrogation is conducted, how someone is arrested or shot down in the street or assassinated from a roof top...
...increasingly, the political vocation consists of a willingness to penetrate official lies and deceptions...
...At this point the notion of politics as a nonstop investigation makes a lot of sense...
...For Costa-Gavras lies are apparently something very dangerous but also quite easy to penetrate, whereas the truth is palpable and irreducible...
...But the answer is no more than a sporting riposte: "Let's say a civilization where men like you would not exist...
...The director is both a muckraking journalist, raging at the lies that kill, and a quasi-Marxist analyst, tracing the larger patterns of corruption and power that make the lies necessary...
...IN The Confession Yves Montand did his best to anchor London in flesh and blood, to release him from a purely historical function, and he does the same with Mitrione in State of Siege...
...However, I think he overdoes the speedup business in State of Siege...
...But not only political character is irrelevant to Costa-Gavras...
...A more honest director (like Pontecorvo) would have shown that political murder, no matter how justified, gets sloppy and vicious, that there's no way to make terrorism clean and gallant...
...He's a master at staging this stuff, and State of Siege has its share of brilliantly realistic moments...
...His characters are seen in the single dimension of their political acts and opinions, and as far as we know, they never suffer a moment's hesitation, never contradict themselves, never stop to reflect or to justify what they are doing...
...Perhaps he lacks the interest or the imagination to recreate a "normal" politics, a politics without violence and fraud...
...Yet apart from a single outburst of ritual anti-Communism we aren't given a clue as to what makes this American tick...
...We never see the actual execution (a rather cowardly omission), but we gather that they perform it without excitement or the pleasures of revenge...
...Thus the Tupamaros are ideal revolutionaries, revolutionaries you would gladly invite for dinner...
...A bolder director (like Godard) might have dramatized the agonizing and comic discrepancy between their personal sweetness and the desperation of their acts...
...For the purposes of Costa-Gavras's films, a man and his "position" are indissoluble, and crises of self-integration never occur...
...Motivation and character are completely beside the point, and the director's passion to expose and illuminate extends only to overt political acts...
...How could the audience fail to love the handsome, disciplined young revolutionaries as they gaily "expropriate" a bunch of cars for the kidnapping...
...Each of his political films has been an investigation, a dissolution of the fraudulent official version of some great public event...
...In the Solinas/CostaGavras conception, Mitrione (called Santore in the movie) was a classic 20th-century killer, a man who was good to his family and friends and fellow workers and who went to his desk every day and placidly consigned people to agony and death...
...What do they imagine the relationship to be between the terrorism they practice and the more humane society they claim to want...
...he never has a chance, dramatically speaking, and although we may be convinced he should die, we may still want more of a character and more of a struggle...
...The world of his films is also prepsychological and rather impersonal...
...How could we not appreciate their exquisite politeness— gallantry even—toward a man they hold in their power, a man they know is a torturer...
...I'm convinced that Costa-Gavras sincerely hates authoritarianism both on the Left (The Confession) and on the Right (Z and State of Siege), but I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't the only style of political action that suits his temperament as a film-maker...
...At one point Mitrione/Santore says to his young interrogator: "Just what kind of a civilization do you think you're fighting for...
...Even the Communist deputy in The Confession, a character who completely dominates the movie, is seen entirely from the outside as a man to whom a terrible injustice is being done...
...Since we are used to seeing Montand as the man of the Left, we may at first be puzzled by his role in State of Siege...
...How could he have remained a Communist even after his own imprisonment and conviction— is he merely stupid, or is some sort of complex self-deception at work in him...
...Again, we aren't given a clue...
...The muckraker and federal attorney are no longer merely our surrogates, the men who look into the dirty stuff while the rest of us go about our business...
...It was an essential part of the moral authority of Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers (also written by Franco Solinas—in a better moment) that the Arab terrorists, who were clearly in the right, were shown to be just as ruthless as their French oppressors...
...But here, Solinas and Costa-Gavras want us to believe that these young revolutionaries who oppose imperialism, oligarchy, and torture with a terrorism of their own are nicer as people than the fat-necked policemen who do Mitrione's bidding...
...Once we've absorbed the shocker—that an American agent has been sent through AID to teach right-wing governments how to use torture— we want a little time to think about it and look at the man doing it, but Costa-Gavras rushes us off to the next bit of evidence...
...He's perfected a style of cinematic exposition—short, explosive scene-fragments gathered together in rhythmic units—that allows him to pack more action and information into his films than almost anyone else...
...Perhaps Costa-Gavras thinks that anything less clear-cut would be an evasion, but an artist knows better...
...as a result The Confession tacked the resonance, the illumination of personal experience that would have made it great...
...We never get a peek at Artur London's inner life, nor an answer to questions about him that probably interest us more than his specific fate, such as, How did this obviously decent man sustain his idealism and his faith in Communism during his apprenticeship, in the thirties, in Moscow and Spain...
...Each of us has become an investigator...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
