|
Interrogations and confessions ("the highest form of self-criticism") are the chief methods of the Soviet Purges, in 1952 Czechoslovakia a high-ranking functionary (Yves Montand) experiences them first-hand. Communist cred (years with the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, concentration camps) means nothing to the inquisitors, who keep their subject starved, manacled, and in continuous debilitating motion in an underground cell. The grueling month is visualized by Costa-Gavras as the opposite of the forward-thrust of Z, the torturous circular stasis of greenish brick walls and blinding spotlights and bellowing accusers. From home there are glimpses of the wife (Simone Signoret) who must accept her husband's trumped-up guilt since the Party is never wrong, from Moscow there's the commissioner (Gabriele Ferzetti) who calmly assures that "now we're just recording the facts. The subjective aspects will be dealt with later." Montand gazes at the hammer and sickle on the cap of the guard pounding him and weeps, Stalin smiles and waves in a jaundiced newsreel insert. Kafka is the apt formal note for the man strangled by the system he believed in erecting, structured as a pair of soul-depleting blocks—the writing of the sham confession in prisons concealed from the world, followed by its recitation before the invasive cameras and microphones of the show trial. The repetitious games of incrimination, the debasement of ideals and icons, the pale and emaciated prisoner who must sit under tanning lamps to look semi-healthy for judges: Such scabrous farce that one defendant can't help dropping his trousers, to endless gales of despairing laughter. Costa-Gavras' vision of horror as "a mere formality," experienced by the survivor who returns to Prague in '68 to find tanks in the streets and graffiti on the walls. "Wake up, Lenin! All's gone mad!" With Michel Vitold, Jean Bouise, and László Szabó.
--- Fernando F. Croce |