Inevitable Costa-Gavras and Yves Montand completism following Z (1969). Over two nights as I found it to be hard work, as was doubtlessly intended. Again in French.
In 1952, for reasons unshown, the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia decided to liquidate some of their leaders who were veterans of the Spanish Civil War. This apparently required a show trial. Most were then executed but a few were given life sentences instead. The bulk of the movie involves the interrogation of Montand — essentially wearing him down with privation and repetition over many months. His odd sharp ripostes to his captors, along the lines of why appeals to his being a good Communist and these charges of treason were contradictory, added welcome but insufficient depth to the politics. The scenes involving his wife (Simone Signoret) were well-constructed and sometimes effective (her response to having her house searched, the congratulations from her fellow factory workers to the trial's outcome).
By way of George Orwell, we know how this scenario goes. I hoped to gain some insight into what value these vintage Communist show trials had to these regimes; the charges were so vague, the evidence mostly omitted, that this process could have applied to anyone and should have convinced no one. It's unclear why Montand's character survived but the others did not. It didn't function quite as well as a time capsule. It closes with some footage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which in combination with the swift reversals of fortune for the interrogators, showed that this approach to controlling the populace (?) was ineffective, brief and illusory.
Roger Ebert: four stars and an excellent review. Based on the memoirs of Lise and Artur London from 1968 (and once again adapted by Jorge Semprún). "Costa-Gavras has made a point of insisting that the movie is anti-Stalinist, not anti-Communist. For that matter, we had some show trials trying to get themselves under way in this country in 1952." Ironically in both of these movies we're shown states suppressing left-wing political movements. Vincent Canby. All about showing interiority by physicality. Fancy cinematic devices, again due to Françoise Bonnot. André Malraux: "A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life." — a sentiment that did not make it far into the twenty-first century.
