With Soderbergh’s Che, Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army, Uli Edel’s Baader-Meinhof Complex and, heck, Spielberg’s Munich all coming out in the last 5 years, it is fair to say that, yes, armed leftist revolutionaries are quite cinematic.
I’ve been a fan of this odd subgenre for quite some time (read this piece from way back in February of 1999) but only now is the rest of the world caught up with me.
Assayas, a difficult filmmaker, knows how to pour on the ambience, and there are sequences in this five-and-a-half-hour mini-series that really hit it out of the park. The soundtrack of early 80s post-punk (Wire, New Order, The Feelies) is an inspired choice. The film as a whole does a fascinating job of fleshing out a lengthy wikipedia entry but, as a whole, it doesn’t quite fit together as drama.
There are 101 great moments, but I can’t say that I really connected to the characters in an emotional way.
The flick does get you thinking, though.
Here’s a concept: we can blame the rise of fundamentalist Islam (and the terrorism that comes with it) on the end of the Cold War. I’m being very serious. The power & money in the Arab world was primarily in the hands of militant Marxist-Leninists during this time. No friend to the West, for sure, but also not the type of psychotics who would revel in the mass death of civilians. The foot soldiers, all a bit twisted, yes, were book smart, and sometimes had a conscience. They talked about dialectics and rambled about economic theory.
When the Wall fell, the men in power in the Middle East wanted to stay there, but since Communism was dead they turned to the opiate of the masses and this film shows the beats that let it happen.
You think the wealthy Syrians give a rat’s ass about Allah any more than they did the struggle of the Proletariat?
Another thing: this movie (which, by the way, gets high marks for staying apolitical, even though it is about political struggles) makes it clear that most of the world’s problems are due to the fact that so many people just can not and will not accept that Jews can have a thriving, independent state. How is it that French citizens, who have all the opportunity in the world to protest their own country’s imperialist agenda (which still exists right now in 2011), spend all of their time and energy fighting over the rights of the Palestinians? And they do so in a way that refuses to accept that culpability for their plight may be even a tiny bit shared with wealthy Arab states as well as the Israelis?
Well, that’s an argument for another day.
You should watch Carlos. It is an interesting story and has some crack filmmaking, even if all the women characters were basically “Blowjob Provider A, Blowjob Provider B, Blowjob Provider C and The Crazy One.”
