“The Days, Nights and Years of the Jackal: The Tale of a Terrorist - New York Times” |
| The Days, Nights and Years of the Jackal: The Tale of a Terrorist - New York Times Posted: 14 Oct 2010 06:05 PM PDT  Carole Bethuel/IFC Films Édgar Ramírez plays the title role in Olivier Assayas's "Carlos." About 15 minutes into "Carlos," Olivier Assayas's excited, exciting, epic dramatization about the international terrorism brand known as Carlos the Jackal, the title character takes a long, loving, vainglorious look in the mirror at his naked body. It's 1974 and after a bungled assassination attempt and an ineffectual bombing, Carlos has just headed down the flamboyant career path — riddled with bodies, rutted by explosions and festooned with publicity — that will inspire pulp fictions, detailed biographies, hyperventilated conspiracy theories and lasting myths. As he luxuriates in his own image, you see how Carlos saw himself: the terrorist as pinup. Pinup, playboy, international man of murder and mystery, the real Carlos the Jackal was keenly image-conscious, partial to suits that, when the cameras rolled, he traded for a black leather jacket and Che-style beret. He had swollen cheeks and eyes as small as BBs, with none of the obvious attractions of Édgar Ramírez, the pretty Venezuelan actor who, as the years pass, first plays him sleek as a panther and later lumbering with fat. The disparity between the original and copy might have been necessary to finance a 330-minute look back at a moldering terrorist, but a glammed-up Carlos also allows Mr. Assayas to get close to the character, showing you the idealist-turned-mercenary in his self-regarding element as the filmmaker takes the longer, cooler, intellectual view. Bigger than life if smaller than his persona, Carlos the Jackal entered the world stage in 1949 as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the eldest son of a Venezuelan lawyer and Marxist whose admiration for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was so fierce that he named his other sons Vladimir and Lenin. After being schooled in the Soviet Union and in the battlefields of the Middle East in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ilich Ramírez joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an extremist group for which he carried out spectacular and spectacularly botched operations. Mr. Assayas, hewing close if not slavishly to the extant record, lines up his facts with care, even as he puts his own spin on the story. To that end, the movie takes off with a soft caress and hard bang in 1973 with a Popular Front operative leaving his lover in bed and being blown to bits in a car on a Parisian street, a prelude to the oppositional dynamics to come. The black-and-white news footage that follows sets the context as a voice-over speculates that the bomb might have been the work of the Israeli secret service, in retaliation for the murderous attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. From there it's a hop, skip and abrupt cut to Lebanon, where Carlos meets a leader of the Popular Front, Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), offering up his warrior bona fides in one of the few awkward expository passages in the generally sharp script by Mr. Assayas and Dan Franck. (Shot in digital and made for French television, "Carlos" is being released in American theaters in two editions: The three-part, 5 ½-hour version has played on the Sundance Channel, while the gutted two-hour-and-45-minute cut will be available on Wednesday through video on demand.) After Carlos signs on with the Popular Front, he joins forces with radical zealots and together they zigzag across Europe and the Middle East, racking up victims and notoriety. Mr. Assayas's fast pans and jump-cuts create an almost frenzied sense of history inexorably hurtling forward, even as the character at the center of this ferment sometimes seems scarcely as motivated. Carlos might be an ideologue as well as a braggart — "You may have heard of me," he announces to some hostages — but his rhetoric has none of the passion of his violence. Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes. Part richly conceived time capsule, part intentionally blurred biopic (Mr. Assayas is too smart to try to solve the riddle of this sphinx), "Carlos" is of its self-conscious historical moment and ours, notably in its consideration of what might inspire an idealist to pick up a gun. Early on in London, Ilich meets one of his lovers (Juana Acosta), who chides him for missing a protest march against the Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. "Words get us nowhere," Ilich responds, just before they're seated in a white-tablecloth restaurant with blood-red walls. "It's time for action." Invoking the Vietcong, Ilich says that he's formed a group that he will lead to glory. "Bourgeois arrogance hidden behind revolutionary rhetoric," the woman answers hotly as silverware gently clinks. Ilich scoffs and proclaims his nom de guerre: Carlos. 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