Unveiling at Cannes in a bladder-shattering six hour screening (that included only one brief intermission), Olivier Assayas’ epic three-part “Carlos” arrived to a half-full theater at the Grand Lumiere. We’re guessing the running time, combined with the fact the film will be hitting TV (for which it was originally conceived) in both Europe and America shortly, kept audiences at bay (plus some attendees/critics do want to simply hang out and/or conduct interviews). But those who did make it were (mostly) rewarded with a film that goes deeper than we could have ever imagined into the life of notorious cold war terrorist Carlos The Jackal, painting a portrait of the self-described revolutionary from his quick rise on the international stage to his quiet fall in a world that no longer seemed suited to his “unique” talents.
Part One: The shortest section of the film, running just over an hour and a half, is also the densest. Here we meet Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Edgar Ramirez), a Venezuelan activist tired of passively taking part in demonstrations that he feels serve no purpose, and eager to take more direct action in the name of socialist causes and the Palestinian liberation movement. After carrying out small attacks in London, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) place him at the fore of European operations, making him second in command to Michel Moukharbal aka Andre (Fadi Abri Samra). Now with the nickname Carlos, he begins to shine with new-found authority – he wants to run international terrorism with a guerrilla warfare mindset, wants every bullet to have an idea behind it and at one point describes weapons as an extension of his body, like his arms. As the audience is plunged into the planning and execution of a handful of operations, we see just how tenuous terrorist action is. Even though it’s a pre-9/11 world where transporting weapons is, in hindsight, foolishly easy, Assayas also displays how much timing and human error can come into play in allowing plots to go awry and plans to change. Even the main thrust of Part One, the hostage-taking in the French Embassy in The Hague with the Japanese Red Army, almost never happened, as the JRA nearly got lost in the streets of the Netherlands. It’s these touches which add a fascinating sense of realism and tension that helps carry the film through its very, very long story. As we reach the end of Part One, Carlos has graduated from idealistic revolutionary to feared terrorist and his biggest action yet is just on the horizon.
Part Two: The majority of part two follows Carlos in what is probably the most notorious exploit of his entire “career”: the hostage-taking at the 1975 meeting of OPEC. On behalf of the PFLP, Carlos violently crashes the conference with his crew, with orders to assassinate Iranian finance minister Jamshid Amuzgar and Saudi Arabian oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani. However, as noted in Part One, plans go terribly awry and despite having most of their demands met, political circumstances force Carlos to let Amuzgar and Yamani go in exchange for $20 million dollars. Furious at what he perceives to be a failed mission, the head of the PFLP Waddie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour) casts Carlos out of the group. Ever resourceful, Carlos begins to form his own terrorist cell for contract work. It’s in this section that Carlos’ political ideals are best elaborated. In one of the film’s finest scenes, Carlos and Yamani have a conversation in which the terrorist says that although he and Yamani share many political interests and causes, it’s his nation’s most recent indulgence to western influence that has made him a marked man. When Yamani asks how Carlos can so coldly decide to murder him, Carlos is surprised and practically offended that Yamani can’t see that these decisions aren’t personal. To Carlos, his actions are the ultimate vindication of his political cause; anything less would be hypocrisy or empty words. Part Two gives us a greater look into Carlos’ mindset and the massive, international network of players that are now involved in his “struggle,” however that network will be tested as pressure comes from around the world to reign in his activities.
Part Three: Unfortunately, this section of “Carlos” is the longest, the most unfocused, and really prevents the overall film from achieving the greatness that, until now, it had been reaching for. With more attention on Carlos than ever before, finding sympathetic nations that will allow him to set up a base is proving to be more difficult. He establishes himself in Budapest, housing with his long term girlfriend Magdalena Kopp (the impossibly beautiful Nora Von Waldstatten who looks like an Austrian Bjork) as well as his partner-in-crime Johannes Weinrich (Alexander Scheer). With a price on his head, and wanted out-of-commission by several governments Carlos’ paranoia increases, causing him to distrust most of the people he comes into contact with. His ego also inflates even as his presence on the world stage seems to diminish; the countries that allow him to stay also demand that he keep his activities low-key. One project Carlos agrees to undertake is the assassination of Anwar Sadat, but it takes him so long to put all the pieces together to pull it off that someone else manages to do it before he does. He attempts to play the media by giving an interview to a journalist, perhaps to raise his profile, but hamstrung by a growing political alliance against him, he must remain invisible. While Assayas was able to keep all the balls in the air for the first two sections of the film, here he gets lost in the increasingly muddled alliances and betrayals between countries, organizations and leaders that Carlos must play within. A lot of it is tedious, or just plain confusing, and some judicious editing could’ve been used to simply highlight key relationships, while maintaining a pace similar to Parts One and Two. As the film builds to his eventual arrest, Assayas takes his time in tying up all the loose ends and instead of feeling you’ve reached the end of a great story, it really feels like a series of epilogues pieced together. This section played after the intermission, and after two fairly thrilling entries, Part Three was a disappointing conclusion.
Overall, we enjoyed the film even if the last part leaves something to be desired. That said, however, there are some issues that pervade the entire length of the project. Foremost, Assayas is rightfully wary of having Carlos from emerge as a sympathetic or likable figure, and in this he mostly succeeds. However, his methods of doing so seem to be shoehorned in, rather than organic: whenever he wants to Carlos to come off like an asshole, Assayas cuts to sequences where he seduces another woman, steals his comrade’s girl or generally acts like the worst male chauvinist you can imagine. This also results in several scenes, scattered through the film, of domestic strife that are too hysterical to be taken seriously and often led to smatterings of laughter from the audience for their over-the-top delivery. While we’re sure Carlos was not a saint, rather than shading the character completely, we instead are reminded every now and then that we’re not supposed to like him. The other problem with the film is the awful, awful indie-rockish score. We’re not sure what the thinking on that one was, but strummy indie guitar, noodling psych rock and a soundtrack of ’80s punk (we couldn’t recognize the bands right off the bat) is a jarring fit for the film. Thankfully, these tracks are not used that often, but whenever the cues crop up it’s highly distracting.
Comparisons to “Che” are already being thrown around for the film, but we don’t quite agree with that assessment. While “Carlos” is a good companion to Steven Soderbergh’s film, they are operating in two different spheres which has a marked impact on the finished products. In Soderbergh’s film there are two key factors that greatly determine its overall feel: firstly, the events in “Che” take place when this kind of revolutionary politics wasn’t just alive in the hearts of people like Guevara, but seemed to many to be realistic and necessary action to take, particularly on college campuses. Guerrilla warfare seemed like the justified reaction of an oppressed people and those feelings found an audience that reached far beyond the borders of Cuba and Bolivia. Secondly, Soderbergh’s film is a successful tragedy; when Guevara’s tactics fail to work in Bolivia we see a man of great conviction forced to face the reality that his passion is difficult to instill in those who aren’t willing to sacrifice their self-preservation for political good. Carlos, by contrast, isn’t particularly tragic, but more a man whose ideals quickly gave way to the requests of the highest bidder. By the time he comes onto the international scene, his politics, which weren’t too far from those of Guevara are now seen at best as naive and idealistic, and at worst as outright terrorism. His shift in political idealism (by the end of the film he converts to Islam) seems driven by what will fetch him a better pay day; he doesn’t hold to a central ideological core. His journey isn’t tragic so much as pathetic. Carlos becomes a man uses high-minded rhetoric, but does little to back it up and is soon made irrelevant by a world where his ideals, such as they are, don’t properly fit.
It will be interesting to see how this film, set to hit theaters in two parts later this year, will be received. While many found “Che: Part 2” too slow, it’s positively kinetic compared to the molasses-paced last third of “Carlos.” But anchored by a magnetic (and probably breakout) multi-lingual performance by Edgar Martinez (who could become this years’ Tahar Rahim) and the definitely engaging, often white-knuckled opening two parts, the film is worth watching, even with the eventual dip in quality it takes. While we didn’t like Part Three, and certainly not after the far more whipsmart Parts One and Two, the story and performances make it worth the sit. Part One: [B+] Part Two: [B+] Part Three: [C]