Monster in law

Jacques Vergès, infamous defender of Nazis and bombers, takes the stand in "Terror’s Advocate."

Dignified and bearing the slightest hint of a smile, French lawyer Jacques Vergès holds court in Barbet Schroeder’s fascinating new documentary, Terror’s Advocate. He clearly knows how to press buttons. “I’ll even defend Bush,” Vergès offers, “but only if he agrees to plead guilty.” Should that scenario ever come to pass, Bush will join a client list that has included Nazi lieutenant Klaus Barbie (“the Butcher of Lyon”), Slobodan Milosevic, global terrorists Carlos “the Jackal” and Magdalena Kopp, and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.

“He calls me ‘my dear enemy,’ ” says Schroeder, laughing, on the phone from Tokyo, where he’s prepping another movie. “ ‘Oh, here comes my dear enemy.’ I wouldn’t call him a friend. But would I hire him?” The subsequent pause is revealing. “I’d have to be in pretty desperate shape—he’s very good at defending lost causes.”

Schroeder, 66 and a cutup in conversation, has a way of bringing out the best in evil. While today’s art-house audiences can enjoy his cameo as a gentle Mercedes-Benz dealer in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, Schroeder is most famous for exploring the depths of depravity, often with unnerving sympathy: Jeremy Irons’s Oscar-winning Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s unhinged roomie in Single White Female and, in the nonfiction realm, General Idi Amin Dada, the 1974 profile that Forest Whitaker says he watched on a daily basis to feed his performance in The Last King of Scotland.

Attracted to scumbags, Barbet? “Obviously,” Schroeder admits. “Seriously, though, I think the point is to give them the chance to speak; to try to understand them. Because it’s not just about people; it’s about history—in Vergès’s case, the history of modern terrorism. It starts with Algiers and goes straight to the Twin Towers.”

The initial reference is to Vergès’s first notable defense (inarguably his most romantic), that of Djamila Bouhired, a.k.a. “La Pasionaria,” the alluring anti-French Algerian café bomber whom he successfully spared from execution in 1960 and ultimately married. For her trial, Vergès devised a “rupture” strategy, evidencing similar crimes perpetrated by the colonial forces. (Under Vergès’s ferocious cross-examination, one French officer admitted to torture.) The technique would inform the rest of his career, transforming the practice of law into an act of political criticism.

“Everything he’s done since is, arguably, a response to colonialism,” Schroeder says. “Basically, Vergès has tried to reproduce the powerful, extraordinary moment of his early career throughout his whole life. It didn’t always work out as nicely.”

Vergès’s law practice took off in the 1960s, a period Schroeder paces through with the speed, scoring and tension of a Bourne movie. “We treated it like a thriller,” he says. “Please don’t spoil any of it! The whole point was to explore what pushes the guy. And part of that is the contrarian idea that if the crowd is going one direction, you run the other. You often have a pretty good chance of being right.” Vergès’s clients get rougher—Palestinian plane hijackers and anti-Israel forces—and suddenly, the attorney disappears for eight years from 1970 to ’78, a period Schroeder does not ignore. (His first on-camera interview is with Pol Pot.)

“I would love to find such incredible characters and stories in a fiction script,” says Schroeder, an avowed straddler of doc and narrative modes. “But it’s rare—and maybe dangerous in this case, because it’s such an important subject. Here, I was able to treat it fully in two hours. But if this were a fiction movie, 25 percent would have been subject, the rest plotting.”

Schroeder, who avidly follows developments in Iran (along with recently elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s increasingly tough responses), is a touch reticent to speak directly to the heart of his subject’s slippery motivation. “It borders on the perverse, obviously. Nostalgia? Maybe. A story of constant compromise.” Terror’s Advocate is still playing commercially in Paris after three months, which both cheers the director and alarms him. “Terrorism is the atomic bomb of the poor,” he says. “It takes patience to understand it—I still don’t understand Idi Amin. But I can go on forever watching him. I do.”

Terror’s Advocate opens Friday. See Now Playing for venues.

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