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Terror's Advocate (2007)

Director: Barbet Schroeder

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From Time Out London

Back in 1974, Barbet Schroeder made a documentary on Idi Amin that prompted the Ugandan leader to place scores of French citizens in Kampala under house arrest until he made cuts to the film. What’s curious is that Schroeder had initially made the documentary in close collaboration with Amin, even subtitling it a ‘self-portrait’ in a nod to the Ugandan’s self-conscious embrace of the project.

There’s a similar dynamic at play in this exploration of the career of Jacques Vergés, a French-Vietnamese lawyer, now 83, who first came to attention working as an advocate for the FLN during Algeria’s war of independence. He has since defended Klaus Barbie and Slobodan Milosevic and made a name for himself as a defender of the ‘indefensible’. Key to the film are a new interview with Vergés and ample archive footage.

It’s hard to gauge exactly what Schroeder thinks of Vergès, who registers as a charming subject driven by a mix of rabid anti-colonialism, a belief in everyone’s right to defence, and a solid desire for celebrity and success. What’s clear is that these instincts could make for a corrupting cocktail in a lawyer, even if Schroeder never points the finger squarely at Vergés and says so. However,what the film does suggest is how admirable independent action in a colonial age can warp into something more sinister in a different, later context. Schroeder explores Vergés’s murky links in the late 1970s and 1980s with Nazi financier François Genoud, who paid for the defence of ‘Carlos the Jackal’ and Barbie. He doesn’t offer simple judgements – Schroeder’s polite, sly approach is to present all the evidence and let us be jury.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1969, May 15-21, 2008

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Technoguy said...

Posted on May 22 2008 22:07 Terror’s Advocate draws you into the serpentine gaze of Jacques Verges.
I was more at ease with scenes of his earlier history when he was chief lawyer
for the anti-colonial Algerians.He was born angry of mixed race,half French and
half Vietnamese.The film starts ominously with him interviewed in his 80s
about the Khymer Rouge atrocities.He merely downplayed them as unintentional
more to do with American bombing.He had befriended Pol Pot in his youth
in France amongst anti-colonial students. He went missing for the 70s decade
and it’s rumoured he was in Cambodia. He qualifies as a lawyer when he’s 30
and his first case was defending Jamila Bouhired,involved with the ‘Milk Bar’
bomb depicted in The Battle of Algiers.He saved her from the death penalty and
married her becoming famous in his use of the ‘rupture defence’ strategy.The
Algerian War of Independence was a great cause.He romanticizes the great liberation
struggle. You sense his youthful idealism and naivety.Upon this solid foundation
Schroeder,the director who seems to side with him here later shows greater ambiguity
and like someone suffering from Stockholm Syndrome seems half beguiled by
the inscrutable enigmatic charm of Verger.who becomes more amoral and dubious
especially when he disappears from 1970-78 and comes back with a changed
outlook.His contacts from PLO ,Carlos the Jackal,Baader-Meinhoff members,
Francois Genoud,a Swiss Nazi financier and Klaus Barbie.He becomes a veritable go
between of terrorists who are fascists and oppressors.
He smokes a big cigar and reels off his anecdotes with a cool unrepentant gaze
regaling us as if with his triumphs and achievements but only answering what he wants to.He is never once challenged and Schroeder said this film is ‘for you’ to
Verges who sat in the audience.As a great defender,he understands where the perpetrator comes from even if he’d never do it himself.But to cross a white line
between counsel and client-exchanging empathy with sympathy-to identify with the client’s cause and fetishise terrorism,even falling in love with the Jackal’s mistress
and to do anything for money is when corruption sets in.There are gaps in the film:
he left his wife and children with no explanation;he disappeared for 10 years,why?
He exhanges oppressed peoples for individual oppressors.He supports Nazis when he
fought them in his youth as part of the Free French forces.We need to draw our own conclusions.

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