Two directors explore less savoury aspects of human morality
Terror's Advocate (12A) dir: Barbet Schroeder
Heartbeat Detector (12A) dir: Nicolas Klotz
Jacques Vergès sports a silver crew cut that makes him look like he's had the top of his head sawn off. Possibly the part containing his scruples. This French-Vietnamese lawyer has a client list to set your knees knocking. In particular, he's partial to African dictators. Are they especially persuasive, do you think? Blaise Compaoré, who started a bloodbath when he took control of Burkina Faso and then forgot to turn off the taps, is on Vergès's books. Robert Mugabe isn't, but watch this space.
After seeing the documentary Terror's Advocate, which plots the rise of this tsar of the Bar, you might say Vergès likes a challenge. His first important case came in 1957, when he defended Djamila Bouhired, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the French for planting a bomb in an Algiers milk bar. His media campaign got her spared the chop; she was soon being touted as a new Joan of Arc. Upon her release, she married him; it was the least she could do. His anger at France's treatment of the Algerians still informs his choices. He agreed to defend Klaus Barbie, he says, because he wanted to show that the French could be as brutal as the Nazis. But couldn't he have made the same point without cosying up to the Butcher of Lyons?
The picture rifles through Vergès's filing cabinet, examining his representation of Palestinian militants and his role as go-between and cheerleader for Carlos the Jackal. He claims to hate seeing a lynch mob gang up on one person, even if that person is Tariq Aziz or Slobodan Milosevic. You need make no effort to imagine him perusing papers on the case of Josef Fritzl, then leaning over to his secretary and saying: "Take a letter, Mlle Jones . . ."
Barbet Schroeder, a dry, elegant director, has always had a taste for regal horror and a willingness to stare ugly facts in the face (past subjects include Idi Amin and Claus von Bülow). He purposely resists coming down too hard on Vergès, but then he doesn't need to. When a man's most effusive character witness is Pol Pot, there's not much damning left to be done.
Having said that, I enjoyed the embarrassing details of Vergès's romantic obsession with Magdalena Kopp, aka Mrs the Jackal. He visited her in prison 150 times, bearing cakes, tarts and smoked ham. He got round the alcohol ban, he boasts, by splashing Armagnac on her ice cream. She knitted him a sweater in return. "I never knitted one for Carlos," she beams naughtily.
Schroeder can't resist dropping in a piece of incriminating evidence now and then to make Vergès look like a dope - or, rather, even more of a dope. There he is holding up that sweater. And here is the sound of him defending the Khmer Rouge genocide as "accidental", which Schroeder plays over images of skeletons piled in the earth like broken crockery.
A few of the ne'er-do-wells in the French thriller Heartbeat Detector might benefit from hiring a vulture of the Vergès sort. For the first hour, this clever, crisply photographed and dreamlike film is steeped in an almost le Carré-like air of espionage. Simon, a corporate psychologist (played by Mathieu Amalric), is requested by his superior to compile a secret report on the company's CEO (Michael Lonsdale), who may or may not be cracking up.
I would have been perfectly happy for the picture to continue in this vein. Halfway through, however, the stakes are raised significantly and soon the film isn't merely addressing the malaise of corporate culture, but linking it to matters far graver than globalisation. The less you know in advance about these surprising twists, the better.
I'm not certain that the intellectual leap in the second half quite comes off, but it is thrilling to watch the film-maker attempting to animate his philosophical ideas. The picture is also superbly acted. Best of all are the scenes between the wiry Amalric and the fabulously rumpled Lonsdale. The latter has a distinguished career behind him, but it must be clear to everyone by now that he was born to play Bagpuss.
Pick of the week
RFK Must Die: the Assassination of Bobby Kennedy (15)
dir: Shane O’Sullivan
Did the CIA kill the Democratic presidential hopeful?
Caramel (PG)
dir: Nadine Labaki
Sex and the City, Beirut-style, centred on a busy beauty salon.
Some Came Running (PG)
dir: Vincente Minnelli
Sinatra stars in this underrated 1958 small-town drama.
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