(Edgar Ramirez, the performance of the year in the movie of the year. Images courtesy of Unifrance and Canal Plus. © Jean-Claude Moireau/Film en Stock/Canal+)
(Note: This is a reworking of my original review of Olivier Assayas's Carlos, first published here.)
An electrifying three-part, 330-minute study of the two decade reign of terror instigated by the Venezuelan-born criminal mastermind Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, Olivier Assayas’s Carlos has a buoyancy and speed that is absolutely enthralling.
The constantly unpredictable French director has created a visually sophisticated movie stamped by tactile detail and emotional intensity. An abridged version is also being made available in some theaters and video on demand. I never saw the shorter version of Assayas’s autobiographical breakthrough Cold Water, if for no other reason than not to disappoint or spoil my reaction of the original’s perfection. The same holds here.
Assayas has created a major achievement that neither sentimentalizes nor romanticizes his subject. Instead he gives full range to Carlos’ spellbinding presence, entwining the character’s pathology and bravura freely, so we get the dramatic personality and deeply skilled leadership capabilities, his sexual power and hold over a number of women contrasted against his murderous impulses, depravity and insecurity.
The movie premiered at Cannes, where a lot of people thought the very work elevated and made memorable this year’s otherwise highly problematic edition. Now, the film is being jointly released, on different media platforms, by the Sundance Channel and IFC Films.
With his key collaborators, the producer Daniel Leconte and his co-writer, the journalist Dan Franck and historical consultant Stephen Smith, Assayas has adroitly fictionalized the story with a compelling alternative narrative that fills in the shadowy gaps and unknowable aspects of the terrorist’s life.Aided by the work of two great cameramen, Denis Lenoir and Yorick Le Saux, Assayas buttresses the movie’s detailed visual design with searing, evocative archival footage or even more subversively, faked material that carries a surreal charge and breaks up and complicates the historical authenticity.
The film is also very much attuned thematically to Assayas’s international breakthrough Irma Vep and his trilogy on global markets, sexual politics and corporate transgression: Demon Lover, Clean and Boarding Gate. Like Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, the movie is a meditation on history and politics. The narrative is shaped by Carlos’s ambitious plan to launch an international Marxist insurrection.
Assayas grounds the time, especially the early nineteen-seventies, with a tumultuous, surreal sense of a world dangerously out of balance. Everything is intensely sexualized and drenched in the possibility of violence or outright oblivion. It opens with a man fondly groping his lover, only moments later, his life ended, by a car explosion.
During those moments, when the tension is nearly unbearable and the violence filled with sorrow and imbued with a tragic vulnerability, the movie achieves a jolting and stunning intensity that forms a kind of arabesque. Assayas beautifully synthesizes the disparate and sometimes contradictory parts. In the regard Assayas’s great collaborator is the exceptional lead actor Edgar Ramirez in the title part. His sensational, star-making turn, at once imposing, tough, freewheeling, offers a palpable and sustained sense of the man’s charisma, wit and imposing intelligence that taken with his inflexible ideological beliefs created his steely and frightening convictions.
The actor’s great facility for languages gives it a novelistic range of voices, the ease and coolness that it shifts from tenses and point of view, the dialogue shifting fluidly among accented English contrasted with the expressively spoken French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.
(Playing the part: actor as terrorist. © Jean-Claude Moireau/Film en Stock/Canal+)
Despite the nearly six-hour running time, Assayas is too smart and original to simply offer another origins tale. The first part is really the story of Carlos’ emergence as a skilled tactician and terrorist operative. He got there very awkwardly, experiencing defeat and humiliation during the process.
Assayas elides over Carlos’ backstory and opens the movie in 1973. Following a failed assassination plot against a prominent Jewish businessman in London, the gun he’s been given fails to properly go off, Carlos is embedded, in Paris, as the European cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), reporting to the Lebanese militant Moukharbal (Fadi Abi Samra).Right off the jump, the film skillfully delineates the complex political and cultural alliances and networks Carlos engineered to achieve his mission.
The first part sharply demonstrates how easily Carlos moved between different ideological factions and autonomous cells, from German revolutionary cells to a cadre of Japanese Red Army militants who stage a daring attack on the French embassy in The Hague to force the release of a comrade detained by the French state security forces.
The most extraordinary set piece in part one is the standoff after a group of French state security forces confront Carlos, whose identity is unknown to them, at a Paris apartment. Working in his typically fluid and mobile camera, Assayas stages the scene as a tense and dramatic back and forth that culminates with a sudden, frightening act of violence, Carlos shooting dead the three policemen.
It is, as J. Hoberman suggested, the obligatory Assayas party scene; as the camera moves back and forth, circling the terrain of the apartment, Carlos trying to extricate himself as cleanly as possible, the stunning conclusion only enlarges his bourgeoning reputation and deepens his profile as an international fugitive.He joins Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), the leader of the PFLP running operations out of South Yemen.
Most of the second part is concerned with Carlos’ most brazen operation that involved seizing control of OPEC headquarters in Vienna during an assassination plot to kill a Saudi oil minister to underscore militant Arab discontent over the role of Saudi Arabia in removing the oil embargo against leading capitalist Western democracies.
Leading a group of six militants, Carlos brilliantly achieves the strategic upper hand.In the combat that ensued, Assayas conveys the hallucinatory carnage and eerie physical destruction. The next hour allows a precise and extraordinarily tense stand off after the militants seize their hostages. Carlos foretells chilling details of the Saudi oil minister’s impending death as the various government factions and state security divisions move toward a negotiated settlement.
The inadvertent death of a Libyan minister during the operation ruptures the group’s exit strategy and ostensibly concludes the mission on an ambiguous, unsatisfactory way that terminates the relationship of Carlos and his Arab benefactor. It opens the way for new partnerships, and the balance of the film demonstrates the bizarre coupling of Carlos and his comrades, mostly German revolutionary cell members, as they broker a series of secret arrangements with the East German state police Stasi and the KGB to fund, arm and mobilize their network of Eastern European and Middle East operatives.
The movie’s third part, the longest section at just under two hours, details the inevitable decline of the terrorist as the collapse of the Eastern bloc undermines their ideological rationale and political pressure abroad all but eliminates whatever any available sanctuaries the group is able to operate in.
Carlos is propulsive and active, but the storytelling is measured by a horrible and profound sense of loss, disruption, even moral cowardice. The movie captures a torrent of terrible violence that incites fear and social destabilization. The violence is never vicarious or removed from human consequence. It is mournful, devastating and often awful to consider.
The movie paints with an eerie and disturbing power the abject horror and craven desperation that violence is heir to. Ramirez is frighteningly good. In the first section, he seizes on his magnetic and sexual attractiveness that solidified his reputation. (Like Che, he was dogmatic, inflexible and a profound womanizer.)
The sensual power he holds over people is driven home during a critical moment early on where he stands naked, and the way he admires himself is suggestive of both his blatant narcissism and a profound desire to please. Ramirez invests the part with an insouciance and daring, an alertness of mind that underscores his vanity, unique abilities and unnerving survival instincts.
The third part, inevitably, deals with the man’s decline. Assayas and his star frame it as a violation and ruin of the body. The lithe and dangerously attractive Carlos of the first two thirds goes swollen, maniacal and foolish. If Carlos intuitively his importance as a Cold Warrior, he has no place, no future, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern bloc creates a new asymmetrical order shaped by a religious fervor and extremism deeply at odds with his own needs and interests.
The dazzling momentum and vertiginous pull of the first two thirds now turns inward, in ways both fascinating and revealing and the master criminal is unmoored, his danger and allure now utterly lacking. He is the dangling man, lost in time and space.
By the time it’s over the sense of exhaustion intermingles with a profound sense of a wonder at a hypnotic and intoxicating movie that, ruminating on a strange historical moment, shows how movies are uniquely qualified to alter, transform and mediate that history into an exciting and deeply satisfying artistic experience.
Five months removed from seeing Carlos, it floats in my own imagination. I’ve seen some terrific movies this year, Black Swan, Meek’s Cutoff, Aurora, The Social Network, coming immediately to mind. Nothing has shaken me up so thoroughly, madly and unpredictably as Carlos.
(Sex and death, ad infinitum. © Jean-Claude Moireau/Film en Stock/Canal+)
Comments