Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/
Posted on Sun, Oct. 10, 2010
Before Osama bin Laden became the byword for terror, before al-Qaeda invaded our collective nightmares, there was Carlos.Dubbed "The Jackal" by the media, the leftist, pro-Palestinian terrorist staged a series of attacks in Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s and '80s that made him one of the world's most wanted men.
"He was this kind of mythic bogeyman of Mideastern terrorism," says director Olivier Assayas, whose stunning, three-part, 5½-hour masterwork, Carlos, will be shown Monday through Wednesday on the Sundance Channel.
Speaking from New York, where he is publicizing the film, Assayas, 55, says he became fascinated with the contradictions between Carlos' actual life and the myth that has surrounded him.
Known as a master of disguises, a master manipulator, and a tactical genius, Carlos was a media darling, who managed to spin his life into a "fantastical narrative . . . for his own self-aggrandizement," says Assayas.
Assayas, whose films include the Juliette Binoche chamber piece Summer Hours and the erotic techno-thriller Demonlover, set out to dissect the myth, basing the film on recently declassified documents, court records, and firsthand accounts.
In an ironic development, Carlos, who was arrested in 1994 and is serving a life sentence at La Santé Prison in Paris for a triple murder, has threatened to sue the filmmakers for marring his image.
Assayas isn't impressed. "Carlos has never told the truth," says the director, who made no attempt to consult the terrorist in making the film.
Born in Venezuela as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez - he was named after his father's hero, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Carlos was trained at a guerrilla warfare school in Cuba before studying economics in Moscow. His career began when he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which sent him on missions in England and France.
The film ignores Carlos' early years, concentrating instead on his career, including an infamous 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which involved hostages, hijacked planes, and the murders of three people. That attack is shown in dazzling detail in the film's propulsive second section.
Carlos is not short on blood and violence, but it really gets under your skin with its brilliant characterization.
The film opens in 1973 when the then 23-year-old terrorist-in-training sets out on his first London mission.
Assayas sets the tone with ruthless efficiency in one of the film's earliest and most memorable set-pieces.
Carlos, played with preternatural intensity by fellow Venezuelan Edgar Ramírez (no relation to Carlos), rushes into the London flat of a prominent Jewish businessman and, without preamble, shoots him in the face.
Carlos' demeanor is strange and seriously creepy: He's nervous, but also clearly turned on by the experience.
When next we see him, Carlos - charismatic and athletic, with thick, dark hair - is luxuriating in a bubble bath in a swank hotel.
Things become a bit surreal when the naked Carlos spends two very long minutes preening in a full-length mirror.
Edgar Ramirez as Carlos and Zeid Hamdan as Youssef
The conjunction of the shooting and the squirm-inducing hotel sequence establish Carlos as one of the most unsettling film presences in recent memory.
"The scene was completely about the narcissism that drives Carlos and that is a defining element of his character," Assayas says. "It felt to me obvious that it had to be inserted into the film in a brutal way."
Assayas hopes the scene will challenge an audience that may be expecting a straightforward thriller.
"It's a violent way to take the narrative a step further than the audience expects," he says. "Just the brutal act of showing the nakedness of Carlos is something that kind of changes the rules."
It's a sure-fire way to wrench Carlos out of fantasy and into reality, says Ramírez, who had an intense turn as an assassin in The Bourne Ultimatum.
"It was a challenging scene to play, but it was important to show that Carlos thought of himself as having a manifest destiny," says Ramírez, 33, "that he was illuminated somehow. . . . That scene establishes the essence behind the man."
Ramírez says he gravitated to the role because of its complexity. Carlos, to him, is defined by contradiction.
"This is a guy who acts as if he is a totally hardcore Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and yet who would buy his clothes at Harrods and wear Pierre Cardin . . . and eat caviar."
Carlos spent the latter part of his career amassing millions of dollars as a mercenary and weapons smuggler, which raises the question: Did he follow a political ideology or was he a cynic?
"I think he became his own ideology," Ramírez says, "a prophet whose message was Carlos himself."
Assayas says Carlos has been his most complex project: The $18 million film was shot over seven months in nine countries. It had more than 120 actors delivering dialogue in 11 languages. (Ramírez speaks five.)
Assayas says his greatest anxiety didn't come from logistical problems, but from the subject matter.
"To me, it was a question of how I would deal with that character every day. He's a violent, brutal man . . . and I felt I would somehow be contaminated by his proximity."
Ramírez, who gained 35 pounds to play Carlos in middle age, is more sanguine. His problems with Carlos were more philosophical.
"I had to battle with the idea that for people like [Carlos] the value of human life is negotiable, that people are expendable," he says. "No political or ideological conviction justifies the sacrifices of a human life."
Showtimes for 'Carlos'
On TV: The full-length, 355-minute edition of Carlos will be shown in three parts on Sundance Channel at 9 p.m. Monday through Wednesday. It will be available on Video On Demand starting Oct. 20.
In Theaters: Two versions of Carlos will screen between Oct. 22 and Oct. 28 at The Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.
The 355-minute cut will be shown in a one-sitting marathon, with screenings Oct. 22 through Oct. 24. (The Oct. 23 screening will be presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia Film Festival).
The shorter, 165-minute version, Carlos: The Theatrical Edition, will screen Oct. 25 through Oct. 28.
Information: www.sundancechannel.
com/carlos/ or http://www.filmadelphia.org/
Contact staff writer Tirdad Derakhshani at 215-854-2736 or tirdad@phillynews.com.
A Sweeping Tale of a Terrorist and His Time
By LARRY ROHTER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
October 8, 2010
EVERYTHING about “Carlos,” the new film from the French director Olivier Assayas, is large and ambitious, from its length — about five and a half hours — to its subject matter: the rise and fall of the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. But that’s not how things started.Initially “Carlos” was meant to be a 90-minute examination of the terrorist’s capture in Sudan in 1994. Once Mr. Assayas, whose work includes the pastoral “Summer Hours” as well as the crime dramas “Demonlover” and “Boarding Gate,” came on board and read through the extensive research that had been accumulated, however, he saw other possibilities.
“Ultimately I realized that the disconnected images I had of Carlos had an interesting, even fascinating connection that somehow paralleled the evolution of Western leftism in those years,” Mr. Assayas said in a recent interview. “So I felt it was the fate of one man and, in a certain way, the story of one generation, plus a meditation on time, history, fate and issues more universal than the specific history of Carlos.”
On one level “Carlos” can be experienced as a thriller with a larger-than-usual overlay of geopolitics. The film’s dramatically rendered centerpiece is the exploit that made Carlos the Jackal internationally known, a December 1976 raid on the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna, in which oil ministers were taken hostage and eventually released for a multimillion-dollar ransom. Initially involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he later became a freelancer, responsible for bomb attacks on trains, banks, restaurants and power stations in Europe, some of them fatal.
But Mr. Assayas also seems interested in offering a psychological portrait of the terrorist mind. Discussing the script, which he wrote with Dan Franck, he mentioned Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Agent” and Dostoyevsky’s “Possessed” as works that are “absolutely part of my background and vocabulary” and that helped him define his attitudes toward terrorism.
In one scene, which takes place after an early attack, Carlos stands naked in front of a mirror, admiring and caressing himself, throwing on talcum powder. At other moments he is abusive to prostitutes and even his German wife, Magdalena Kopp, part of a group of women from the Baader-Meinhof revolutionary cell who mix dourness with hysteria.
The film also depicts an almost Keystone Kops element to many of Carlos’s attacks, undermining the image of the terrorist mastermind that he himself cultivated. One group of attackers can’t find the embassy that they’ve targeted, for instance, while a sloppy operation in Paris ends with rocket-propelled grenades being fired hastily at an El Al passenger plane and missing; in another incident Carlos can’t properly open the door to a bank he wants to bomb.
“He’s such an amateur at times,” said Stephen Smith, a former foreign correspondent and Le Monde editor who compiled the film’s research, some of it from the files of intelligence agencies. “Sometimes I found myself wondering, ‘He’s so dilettantish, how can we depict him as a super-terrorist?’ ”
Mr. Assayas, 55, describes his own political sympathies as “libertarian left,” meaning that he is anti-Stalinist, anti-Maoist and very much aware of the way that revolutionary idealism often curdles into something sinister and oppressive. That appears to be the sentiment that informs the OPEC episode, in which Carlos deliberately tried to strike a resemblance to Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara as the “heroic guerrilla.”
“Carlos is himself an actor,” Mr. Assayas said. “He is extremely media conscious, so when he organizes the Vienna operation, he decides to adopt some kind of Che look, which is fairly ridiculous, right? Even though he was the head of this extremely cynical operation, financed by brutal powers of the Middle East, he was very keen to keep this kind of image of champion of the oppressed and third-world revolutionary, even though what he was doing was exactly the opposite.”
Because of the historical sweep of “Carlos” and the amount of time that the title character was going to spend on screen, Mr. Assayas said he worried about finding an actor “with the shoulders and the charisma to carry this kind of movie on his back.” But his concerns ended when he saw Édgar Ramírez, who has played assorted assassins or revolutionaries in films including “Vantage Point,” “The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Che.”“I think it was kind of a miracle to have found Édgar,” Mr. Assayas said. “Not only does he have the presence, the physicality and the charisma of Carlos, he’s also a very smart man who understood exactly what was going on in the story in terms of the politics, from the 1970s onward.”
Like the real Carlos, Mr. Ramírez is a Venezuelan; their families come from the same small Western Andean state. Mr. Ramirez, 33, whose father is a military officer and whose mother has a law degree, studied communications in college before becoming executive director of a civic group that encourages young people to register to vote, so the world of politics was familiar to him.
“If I were to say that ever since I was a child I’ve dreamed of being an actor, I’d be lying,” Mr. Ramírez said. “When I was younger, I thought about participating more directly in politics. But as an actor your intentions are more poetic, and so I think I can do more than in politics.”
Discussing his character, Mr. Ramírez contrasts what he calls Carlos’s “hedonism” with Che’s “austerity and unselfishness.”
Carlos is “a bit of a monster, a bit of a dreamer, a bit of an idealist, a bit of an assassin, a mixture of everything, full of contradictions, and that’s what made him interesting to me,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Even after having been through the experience of trying to play him, he continues to be a mystery to me.
“Carlos became famous for always being a master of disguise. That, I believe, is the key. Carlos is always revealing the side of him that fits the place and works for him in that moment, whether the spoiled but charming rich kid or the ruthless mercenary.”
Because of its unusual length and structure, “Carlos,” originally filmed as a mini-series for French television, has proven a challenge to market. Beginning Monday night the film will be broadcast in three parts on the Sundance Channel before opening Friday in two theatrical versions: one edited down to two and a half hours, as well as three separate films to be shown at a handful of theaters. (In New York the shorter version will be shown at the Lincoln Plaza Theater and the three-chapter version at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.) In another unusual wrinkle “Carlos” will also be available through video on demand even as it is being shown in theaters.
“I think it is safe to say that neither we nor anyone else have done anything quite like this, using TV as a springboard for a film,” said Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, which is distributing the movie. “In a world of fragmented television viewing, it takes a lot to break through the clutter. But this film was made for this kind of experiment.”
As for Carlos, 60, and serving a life sentence in a French prison, he continues to be savvy about manipulating the news media. Through his wife and lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, he has complained about the film, citing details both small (he said he smokes cigars rather than cigarettes) and large (the attack on the OPEC meeting in Vienna was supported, he claimed, not by Saddam Hussein but by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader). As the movie was about to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, he sent a public letter to Mr. Ramírez, reproaching him for having appeared in the film, and has also apparently demanded a share of the film’s profits.
“We made a movie based on his life, not a biography or a documentary,” Mr. Ramírez said. “But he is a person with very strong opinions, so it was no surprise to us that he had a reaction.”
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