by Allan Fish
(France 2010 330m) DVD1/2
Aka. Carlos the Jackal
This is the time for action
p Jens Meurer, Daniel Leconte d Olivier Assayas w Olivier Assayas, Dan Franck ph Denis Lenoir, Yorick le Saux ed Luc Barnier, Marion Monnier art François Renaud Labarthe
Edgar Ramirez (Ilich ‘Carlos’ Ramirez Sanchez), Alexander Scheer (Johannes Weinrich), Alejandro Arroyo (Dr Valentin Hernández), Ahmad Kaabour (Wadie Haddad), Juana da Costa (Carlos’ lover), Talal-El-Jordi (Ali), Christoph Bach (Angie), Nora von Waldstätten (Magdalena Kopp), Rodney el Haddad (Khalid), Julia Hummer (Nada), Antoine Balabane (Général-al-Khouly), Katharina Schüttler (Brigitte Kuhlmann), Susanne Wuest (Edith Heller), Anna Thalbach (Inge Viett),
There’s something about Assayas’ biopic of infamous revolutionary terrorist Carlos that could not help but recall Steven Soderbergh’s Ché (he even gets a mention in the opening exchanges). It’s understandable considering Carlos saw himself as another Ché and was pretty much the most wanted man on the planet for a time. Assayas’ film follows him from 1973, starting out working for the PFLP in London and Paris working for an intermediary taking orders from Iraq, through infamous attacks in Germany and France, taking hostages at the OPEC conference in Vienna in 1975, through to setting up his own group of renegades and their slowly drifting into obscurity prior to capture in 1994.
Carlos was originally intended to be a straightforward ninety minute TV movie. Assayas quickly saw the character needed a lot more screen time than that to do him justice, and the project quickly expended to firstly be two films and then three. It showed on French TV in the early part of 2010 and was then cut down to 160 minutes for its theatrical run. Specialist theatres still showed the full TV cut in three parts and DVD and Blu Rays featured both. Attending a showing in New York at which Assayas was in attendance, a friend asked Assayas what the differences were between the full cut he had just seen and the theatrical cut playing through most of the city. Assayas replied “a little bit of everything”, and succinct though that is, it’s largely true. The majority was taken out of what would be the latter part of Part Two and Part Three, the period in the eighties where Carlos was becoming something he feared most of all; obsolete. Unlike Soderbergh, Assayas analyses the man and the myth, and exposes him for what he was, a publicity seeking would-be idealist who epitomises all that is wrong with terrorist ideology. Taking up arms in what they see as a war and committing worse atrocities than the regimes they are supposedly fighting. It doesn’t judge them, but allows the audience to clearly see how delusions of grandeur and what is perceived to be a just cause can leave people open to charges of self-righteous hypocrisy, allowing characters who are just plain psychotic to hide behind the banner of revolution. “I have done a great deal for the Palestinian cause” Carlos tells his boss Haddad, only to be told “you have done a great deal for your own cause.” He believes he is justified in doing anything because it’s for the cause, even his constant infidelity to a succession of wives is to be tolerated; he becomes little more than a Mafioso without allegiance, a point made in a scene where Carlos chases his daughter around a garden in the manner of Marlon Brando’s death scene in The Godfather. And if Coppola is an influence, it’s easier to tie it in to the series of films about crime, corruption and terrorism in the seventies already released – The Baader Meinhof Complex, Red Riding, Mesrine, United Red Army – and it’s worthy of comparison. In the end, it bites off a little bit more than it can chew and the last part is unavoidably a comedown for the audience as it was for the man in real life. Yet it makes one consider the changes in the political landscape since like no other recent film has, while the performances are exceptional, with special mention to von Waldstätten as his German wife and especially Ramirez, bloated up in the last act like De Niro in Raging Bull. If it’s flawed, it’s still a better film than many so-called perfect films.
I will admit that the last third disappointed me a bit, focusing more on Carlos’ “Fat Elvis” period and choosing to ignore his arguably more interesting time in prison, responding to a new generation of global terrorism, entirely (call it his Cat Stevens period). Nevertheless, this is a powerhouse set of films, and among the rare ones that are equal amounts important, well-crafted, intellectually engaging and above all FUN. Any movie with this much period-perfect sex & violence should be required viewing for all cinephiles (it’s even better when paired with “The Baader Meinhof Complex”, which plays like a fast-forward version of this film).
Unlike Bob (and Allan) I am not remotely disappointed with the last section of the film, as to do so would expect perfection in a five-and-a-half hour film. The fact that the film riveted for as long as it did, and that I was frankly never bored is really what I prefer to talk about. It is a masterful, all-encompassing, often electrifying film with scope more far reaching than four films, and a central performance that defines screen acting. It contends for the best film of 2010 with the likes of two other French films, LOURDES and UN PROPHETE, two American films, TOY STORY 3 and WINTER’S BONE, a Tribeca hit, DOG POUND and a documentary, JEAN-MICHELE BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD.
After watching CARLOS the last thing I want to mention is that there are a few minor flaws (a given). My excitement and appreciation won’t allow me to compromise the experience or perhaps even to violate it.
What do we lose if we decide to opt for the shorter version?
I wonder the same thing in terms of length…….
All I can say is that having experienced the Roadshow Version at the NYFF, I wouldn’t want it any other way, even with my misgivings over the “Fat Elvis” portion.
Yeah, this is the type of film that would be far more than just comprised in the shorter version. The entire point of it is the wide scope.
The third part is less of a comedown when you watch the whole thing mini-series style, and the film needs a dying-fall finish to deromanticize Carlos after the provocative glamour of the first part. Even then, however, I think Assayas emphasizes the shallowness of Carlos’s ideology and the extent to which terrorism is simply the fashionable or cool thing to do (or symapthize with) in certain social circles. The movie is Scorsesean epic satire (cue the music) rather than Coppolesque tragedy, though the influence of both directors is obvious and strong.
Since I haven’t seen Lourdes and consider Un Prophete a 2009 film I place Carlos neck-and-neck with THE SOCIAL NETWORK as the best of 2010 so far, but there’s a lot yet to come.
I agree that the “Fat Elvis” stuff is there primarily to remove any hint of rock-star glamour from Carlos, and it’s worthwhile. I just think it’s odd that it also completely ignores his time in prison– granted, the movie had to end somewhere, and his jail-time would provide enough material for another 2 1/2 hour film, but it’d be a tremendous capper. Just as with “Che”, whatever you ignore can always be picked up by somebody else (I do find the comparisons to Gueverra interesting, here– if anything, Carlos made Che look like the saint that dim-witted T-Shirts have already turned him into).
I’d agree that there’s movie material in Ramirez’s prison time, but Assayas’s film is as much about a representative fugitive life as it is a Ramirez biopic, so prison would probably be anticlimactic, especially since the last hour shows Carlos in a kind of prison of his own obsolescence. On the other hand, if Carlos is a Scorsesean epic on the Goodfellas or Casino model it probably does need that anticlimax finish with the protagonist in exile from power.
I’m not so sure about that. Remember, Carlos has largely been in prison during the rise of a new phase in Middle Eastern terrorism, one that’s far less motivated by 60’s era political idealism, and more by religious zealotry. While the revolutionary vanguard rots in jail, the jihad terrorizes the world. To me, that would show his obsolescence more than anything else.
I enjoyed this immensely, esp. the use of music, from New Order to the Feelies to the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer.” I thought, at times, they were pretty audacious picks for Assayas as typically a filmmaker would just use a traditional music score but clearly the director is equating punk rock/New Wave music with the kind of DIY/punk rock attitude of Carlos.
Bob, I thought Assayas demonstrated Carlos’s obsolescence through his failure to organize a hit on Sadat before the jihadists did and by his pathetic-seeming attempt to espouse Islam in order to curry favor with the condescending Iranians. Carlos was obsolete before he was caught. The reason to show him in prison might be to illustrate how he’s adopted radical Islam, in a way, as the latest revolutionary fashion, and that revolution was always to some extent an act of fashion for him. I don’t know if Assayas wanted or needed to make that point, however.
Yeah, I guess I just find Carlos a dramatic enough figure that it feels a little odd to skip over his latest, morbidly fascinating phase to spend so much time in his penultimate, and least interesting one. But just as “The Motorcycle Diaries” didn’t have to be part of “Che”, perhaps that’s just a whole other movie altogether.