Omar Radad and Jacques Verges in the documentary "Terror's Advocate." (Photo: Magnolia Pictures)Movie Review
Terror's Advocate (2007)
Building a Case Against the Worldly Lawyer to the Notorious
October 12, 2007
By A. O. SCOTT The New York Times (USA)
When we first meet Jacques Vergès — even before the opening titles of “Terror’s Advocate,” Barbet Schroeder’s astonishing new documentary — he is playing down the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Of course terrible things happened, he says, making use of the rhetorical tactic favored by revisionists and deniers of all stripes, but let’s not exaggerate. And this attitude is what you might expect from someone who counts Pol Pot, the principal author of the Cambodian slaughter, as one of his old friends. Charming.
But Mr. Vergès, a well-known French lawyer whose clients have included Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal, does show himself, in the long interviews that are the backbone of Mr. Schroeder’s film, to be charming, as well as eloquent and witty. Sitting in the mellow light and elegant décor of his office, brandishing what must be a very fine cigar, he is sometimes candid, sometimes sly, and never at a loss for words.
Mr. Schroeder’s decision to begin the film with Mr. Vergès’s remarks on Cambodia, out of sequence in a story that stretches from World War II into the 1990s, seems like an attempt to inoculate the audience against Mr. Vergès’s powers of seduction, as well as a foreshadowing of the film’s case against him.
Not that this case is made overtly. The bulk of the interviews are with Mr. Vergès’s colleagues, clients and comrades in various causes, and most of the journalists and scholars called in to testify range from scrupulously neutral to implicitly sympathetic. Mr. Schroeder’s methods of documentation are thorough and objective, and the extent and doggedness of his research are remarkable. His crew speaks with old lions of the Algerian resistance, with aging militants of the European new left and even with Carlos himself, the mysterious Venezuelan terrorist mastermind who chats by telephone from a French prison. Mr. Schroeder’s only obvious manipulation is in his use of Jorge Arriagada’s score, which gives “Terror’s Advocate” the sinister, foreboding ambience of a thriller.
And indeed it is one of the most engaging, morally unsettling political thrillers in quite some time, with the extra advantage of being true. Mr. Vergès, who all but vanished for eight years in the 1970s, who tried to steal Carlos’s girlfriend, who is more of a celebrity than a pariah in France, is a character worthy of Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad. He’s far too subtle and strange for the average Hollywood potboiler-maker. And he is lucky (though he might not think so) to have found so capable a chronicler as Mr. Schroeder, whose previous real-life subjects include Claus von Bülow (played by Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune”) and Idi Amin (playing himself in the documentary “General Idi Amin Dada”).
How did Mr. Vergès earn his place in this gallery? If not for the early Cambodia sequence, you might mistake the first part of “Terror’s Advocate” for a portrait in political heroism. The child of a Vietnamese mother and a father from Réunion, a French outpost in the Indian Ocean, Mr. Vergès came of age in the French Resistance and then in the anti-colonialist movement. His ideals were impeccable.
“For me,” he says, explaining his decision to join de Gaulle and fight the Germans, “France was Montaigne, Diderot, the Revolution, and it was intolerable to me that that could disappear.”
But France was also the country whose soldiers, on May 8, 1945 — V-E Day — massacred thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Sétif and other Algerian cities. A decade later Mr. Vergès was in Algiers, defending members of the Algerian independence movement, including bombers recruited by Saadi Yacef, who would go on to play himself in “The Battle of Algiers” and who shares some reminiscences with Mr. Schroeder in this film. One of the most famous bombers was Djamila Bouhired, a kind of Pasionaria of the anti-colonialist struggle, whom Mr. Vergès later married.
The tactics of the National Liberation Front were brutal, but so were those of the French occupiers, who tortured suspected militants and ordered the assassination of their representatives, including Mr. Vergès. As the film traces his subsequent career, though, it begins to seem as if Mr. Vergès would ally himself with anyone willing to plant a bomb or hijack a plane in the name of the oppressed.
And so he became the smiling, civilized mouthpiece for members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction in Germany, defending their bloodiest actions as the work of “soldiers in a noble cause.” (It is not clear that he would say the same thing about Mr. Barbie, killer and torturer of Jews and Resistance fighters in World War II, or about Slobodan Milosevic, another client. But then again, it’s not clear that he wouldn’t.)
Whether Mr. Vergès’s activities went beyond courtroom advocacy is one of the questions Mr. Schroeder explores. He marshals considerable evidence, including documents from the files of the East German secret police, to suggest that Mr. Vergès was much more than the favorite lawyer of some of the world’s most notorious terrorists. Mr. Vergès’s involvement with Carlos, which he minimizes when he is not bragging about it, is particularly intriguing. And his association with François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi and financier of terrorism, is downright chilling.
In chronicling Mr. Vergès’s various adventures, Mr. Schroeder writes a rich and disturbing chapter in the history of political violence in our time, a story in which the pursuit of justice leads down the crooked path of nihilism.
The most disturbing aspect of this sorry tale is that Mr. Vergès, as he moves from the nationalism of the National Liberation Front through the Marxism of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction toward the radical Islamism of his later, Iranian-backed clients, continues to speak in the soothing, familiar idiom of humanism. And also in the relaxed, self-satisfied tones of a man who believes himself a hero, even in a movie that proves otherwise.
TERROR’S ADVOCATE Opens today in New York and Los Angeles. Directed by Barbet Schroeder; in English and French, with English subtitles; directors of photography, Caroline Champetier and Jean-Luc Perréard; edited by Nelly Quettier; music by Jorge Arriagada; produced by Rita Dagher; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 132 minutes. This film is not rated.
But Mr. Vergès, a well-known French lawyer whose clients have included Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal, does show himself, in the long interviews that are the backbone of Mr. Schroeder’s film, to be charming, as well as eloquent and witty. Sitting in the mellow light and elegant décor of his office, brandishing what must be a very fine cigar, he is sometimes candid, sometimes sly, and never at a loss for words.
Mr. Schroeder’s decision to begin the film with Mr. Vergès’s remarks on Cambodia, out of sequence in a story that stretches from World War II into the 1990s, seems like an attempt to inoculate the audience against Mr. Vergès’s powers of seduction, as well as a foreshadowing of the film’s case against him.
Not that this case is made overtly. The bulk of the interviews are with Mr. Vergès’s colleagues, clients and comrades in various causes, and most of the journalists and scholars called in to testify range from scrupulously neutral to implicitly sympathetic. Mr. Schroeder’s methods of documentation are thorough and objective, and the extent and doggedness of his research are remarkable. His crew speaks with old lions of the Algerian resistance, with aging militants of the European new left and even with Carlos himself, the mysterious Venezuelan terrorist mastermind who chats by telephone from a French prison. Mr. Schroeder’s only obvious manipulation is in his use of Jorge Arriagada’s score, which gives “Terror’s Advocate” the sinister, foreboding ambience of a thriller.
And indeed it is one of the most engaging, morally unsettling political thrillers in quite some time, with the extra advantage of being true. Mr. Vergès, who all but vanished for eight years in the 1970s, who tried to steal Carlos’s girlfriend, who is more of a celebrity than a pariah in France, is a character worthy of Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad. He’s far too subtle and strange for the average Hollywood potboiler-maker. And he is lucky (though he might not think so) to have found so capable a chronicler as Mr. Schroeder, whose previous real-life subjects include Claus von Bülow (played by Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune”) and Idi Amin (playing himself in the documentary “General Idi Amin Dada”).
How did Mr. Vergès earn his place in this gallery? If not for the early Cambodia sequence, you might mistake the first part of “Terror’s Advocate” for a portrait in political heroism. The child of a Vietnamese mother and a father from Réunion, a French outpost in the Indian Ocean, Mr. Vergès came of age in the French Resistance and then in the anti-colonialist movement. His ideals were impeccable.
“For me,” he says, explaining his decision to join de Gaulle and fight the Germans, “France was Montaigne, Diderot, the Revolution, and it was intolerable to me that that could disappear.”
But France was also the country whose soldiers, on May 8, 1945 — V-E Day — massacred thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Sétif and other Algerian cities. A decade later Mr. Vergès was in Algiers, defending members of the Algerian independence movement, including bombers recruited by Saadi Yacef, who would go on to play himself in “The Battle of Algiers” and who shares some reminiscences with Mr. Schroeder in this film. One of the most famous bombers was Djamila Bouhired, a kind of Pasionaria of the anti-colonialist struggle, whom Mr. Vergès later married.
The tactics of the National Liberation Front were brutal, but so were those of the French occupiers, who tortured suspected militants and ordered the assassination of their representatives, including Mr. Vergès. As the film traces his subsequent career, though, it begins to seem as if Mr. Vergès would ally himself with anyone willing to plant a bomb or hijack a plane in the name of the oppressed.
And so he became the smiling, civilized mouthpiece for members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction in Germany, defending their bloodiest actions as the work of “soldiers in a noble cause.” (It is not clear that he would say the same thing about Mr. Barbie, killer and torturer of Jews and Resistance fighters in World War II, or about Slobodan Milosevic, another client. But then again, it’s not clear that he wouldn’t.)
Whether Mr. Vergès’s activities went beyond courtroom advocacy is one of the questions Mr. Schroeder explores. He marshals considerable evidence, including documents from the files of the East German secret police, to suggest that Mr. Vergès was much more than the favorite lawyer of some of the world’s most notorious terrorists. Mr. Vergès’s involvement with Carlos, which he minimizes when he is not bragging about it, is particularly intriguing. And his association with François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi and financier of terrorism, is downright chilling.
In chronicling Mr. Vergès’s various adventures, Mr. Schroeder writes a rich and disturbing chapter in the history of political violence in our time, a story in which the pursuit of justice leads down the crooked path of nihilism.
The most disturbing aspect of this sorry tale is that Mr. Vergès, as he moves from the nationalism of the National Liberation Front through the Marxism of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction toward the radical Islamism of his later, Iranian-backed clients, continues to speak in the soothing, familiar idiom of humanism. And also in the relaxed, self-satisfied tones of a man who believes himself a hero, even in a movie that proves otherwise.
TERROR’S ADVOCATE Opens today in New York and Los Angeles. Directed by Barbet Schroeder; in English and French, with English subtitles; directors of photography, Caroline Champetier and Jean-Luc Perréard; edited by Nelly Quettier; music by Jorge Arriagada; produced by Rita Dagher; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 132 minutes. This film is not rated.
1 comment:
Very slim chance to convict Khieu Samphan with Jacques Vergès on his side, unless Jacques Vergès's old age taking its toll. We'll see.
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