REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Christopher Hudson on the innocence of CostaGavras
The cinema is the best medium there is for conducting a political argument because the most partisan narrative can be given the illusion of documentary reality. Costa-Gavras's new film, similar in the logical force of its exposition and the masterly pacing of its direction to his earlier film Z, is called State of Siege (" X" C urzon).
Philip Michael Santore, an American Agency for International Development official, is found assassinated in an anonymous Latin American state not many leagues from Uruguay, He is given a sumptuous funeral attended by diplomatic and military top brass and conducted by the Papal Nuncio. Who is he?And what has he done? We return to his kidnapping, efficiently carried out by co-ordinated groups of respectable young guerrillas — Tupamaros, or as the government prefers to call them, "unmentionables," " terrorists." Under questioning it emerges that his position as an AID consultant on transport and traffic-flow is a front for much more serious work as an alumnus of the international Police Academy advising the local government on police control, counter-revolutionary tactics, the quiet, ruthless suppression of dissident political activity. (The precision of the case made against Santore, and the authenticity of some of the factual detail, suggest that Costa-Gawas, and his co writer Franco Solinas who scripted The Battle of Algiers, are using a historical precedent. It appears that Dan Anthony Mitrione, a "technician " in the police section of AID, was assassinated under similar circumstances by the Tupamaros in 1970.) As
public investigation reveals American involvement at several levels of police and state activity, it begins to look as if the government will be forced out of office. At the last moment a lucky turn of events for it changes the situation entirely.
At the centre of the film is the interrogation of the AID official by a young guerrilla — a playingoff of one innocence against another more culpable innocence almost identical to that presented in Christopher Hampton's play Savages now at the Comedy. The trouble with innocence in a setting of political extremism is that it is almost invariably wrong. To create ambiguous sympathy the role of Santore is given to Yves Montand, normally cast as the sacrificial victim of fascist authority. He is shown as a family man, serious, physically courageous, a coherent exponent of the capitalist ethic and the need to protect democracy from the corruption of communist ideology, and unable to appreciate that values in a labour-intensive society might be different from his. As a result the guerrillas are hard pressed to convict Santore of enough direct guilt in master-minding the brutal machinery of the police to vindiI cate his execution at the end. Santore cannot be held to have tortured anyone or instigated torture: that he was responsible for a philosophy of repression with which other men justified torture, as the guerrillas accuse him, seems to deserve a corrective not a retributory punishment. The guerrillas' innocence is to confuse the symbol with the reality. Costa-Gavras's innocence — for such I think it is — is to go too far in playing fair with us, so that, for all his insistence on the paraphernalia of state fascism, he fails to coerce us into accepting that Santore's death is justified.
Whether one agrees with his conclusion or not, the power and honest indignation behind State of Siege is not in question. It is a fascinating film whether you take it as adventure of polemic; I recommend you to see it. The Hireling (" A " Carlton) comes to us bearing gold from the Cannes festival. Adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from an L. P. Hartley story, and directed by Alan Bridges, it describes the relationship between a chauffeur and a young society widow — a theme Hartley returned to from his first novel in which a Bostonian lady becomes infatuated with a handsome gondolier. But this tirn, there is less
wishful thinking: e lady, who relied on the chauffeur as she recovered from a nervous breakdown following her husband's death, soon moves back into her natural element, leaving the infatuated chauffeur bitterly aware of his lowly status.
It is beautifully filmed. Sarah Miles as Lady Franklin, coming out of the mental hospital benumbed in a blank, hopeless lethargy and gradually regaining confidence, gives a remarkable performance and reminds us what a dreadful film Lady Caroline Lamb must have been to have obscured so much talent and vitality. Robert Shaw is finely matched as the chauffeur, ex-sergeant-major Leadbetter, beaten down by forces he cannot command or punch in the face. It is a role Oliver Reed would have bellowed through: Robert Shaw's restraint makes his orgy of self-pitying vindictiveness at the end all the more moving. The Hireling is a better film than The Go-Between, but my criticisms of it are similar. Hartley's lost world — here set in the early 'twenties — can be recreated on the screen but not revitalised. It is a perfectly-finished world, in which his characters live not by what they do but by what they are — creatures of his style and construction. Film cameras cannot dwell upon them without wresting them from this environment and betraying in them an artificiality we accept on the printed page.
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