"Terror's Advocate"

(Updated; blogger has since taken refreshing nap to stave off further such errors as seen below; thanks commenter Griff!)

Barbet Schroeder's documentary about the controversial French lawyer Jacques Verges, whose beginnings as an anti-colonialist crusader have been somehwat, shall we say, eclipsed by his subsequent defenses of the likes of Carlos the Jackal and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, not to mention a shady association with Cambodian butcher Pol Pot, is not Verges' film debut. That was in 1988, in MarcelCarne'sOphuls' epic documentary on Barbie, Hotel Terminus. CarneOphuls introduces Verges pretty late in the film, and had he made the picture in Smell-o-Vision, I dare say that he would have accompanied Verges' first appearance with a sulphuric blast. While the film's portrayal of the repellent but personality-free Barbie is in line to a certain extent with the banality-of-evil notion, Carne clearly wants to paint the elegant, smooth-talking, cigar-smoking Verges as the devil incarnate. And Verges seems happy to cooperate.

He's pretty slick in Schroeder's film, too, once again waving around that cigar, never raising his voice, never visibly irritated. Even though he couldn't get Barbie off, here he brags about how it was him against something like 40 other lawyers at Barbie's elaborate trial, and how everyday he set them back...(His main defense was that what Barbie did as a Nazi was no different than what the French did in Algeria. This deflection strategy has its roots in the "rupture defense" that Verges pioneered, in which accused terrorists refused to accept that they were under the jurisdiction of the state bringing them to trial, etcetera.)

Schroeder's picture is more fascinating than most talking-head docs because the subject matter is so weirdly compelling and pertinent. Verges' tale is also a story of the mutation of the terror zeitgeist, from what many would call the laudable struggle of the Algerian people to the decadent terror-chic of Carlos and Magdelena Kopp, both of whom speak in the film (Carlos by phone, as he's locked up in prison but good.) The film is not shy about confronting the bald-faced anti-semitism of some pro-Palestinean organizations that learned their tactics from the Algerian struggle, the connections between PLFP leader Waddi Haddad and Swiss Nazi Francois Genoud, and more. Weaving in and out of these stories, the clearly brilliant Verges is largely glib. When discussing his eight-year disappearance between 1970 and 1978, he barely blinks as he insists that cutting off every tie was necessary at the time. To illustrate that, he says that he gave up smoking a pipe and took up cigars; he never mentions his abandonment of his wife, Algerian crusader Djamila Bouhired (whom Verges defended), and their two children. Oh well.

It's a fascinating portrait, but it's also a bit choppy and rushed and lopsided; the Barbie affair first rears its head in like, maybe, the last 20 minutes of this 134-minute picture. Terror's Advocate could be, should be, longer, if only to give it, and its audience, some breathing room. Not as long as Terminus, okay. But another half-hour or 40 minutes, absolutely.

Comments

[Griff]

Uh, Glenn, Marcel Ophuls directed HOTEL TERMINUS.