|
I cannot really add much more to zedz's excellent critique of the film, but having now finally seen it I would certainly agree about this being a continuation of the globalisation theme of Assayas' work. As with Demonlover this film is packed to the brim with transitional spaces - bars, hotels, runways, staircases of all kinds, and especially cars and planes, all showing people travelling without really getting anywhere (and as with Demonlover, sex is often equated with violence or threat! Along with the threat seeming to be something more paranoia-induced than really existing at first. Or maybe only really existing because the paranoia induced it? I assume though that all of the many fade to blacks that were also present in Demonlover are here more to do with advert breaks?)
On that note, I wonder if anyone has tallied up all of the scenes of people getting into and out of cars throughout the films - it has got to be in the dozens! (Someone should do one of those Cinemetric charts of the various shots!) I find it very amusing that the film illustrates how many different ways there are to use cars: driving it yourself alone; tailing someone; travelling with another person to take them to work or to hold a conversation; getting chauffeured in style; getting bundled into the back seat (most of the characters have this happen to them at one point or another! Angie is the only character who has the sense, when seeing a car waiting for him, to immediately run off in the other direction! Yet tellingly this sensible escape marks his last appearance in the film!); being blown up; blowing up others; being stretchered into the back of ambulances; having a military escort; having a police escort; hiring a car for a job; handing a car over to others; waiting to getaway drive from a crime scene; and so on! While the planes get used for similar back and forths in a couple of major sequences, the difference there is that the characters are more obviously at the mercy of the pilots and the airports letting them land!
Eventually when the characters get to more intimate, homely environments they often immediately get violated, such as the 9, rue Toullier apartment from Part 1 ; or they get turned into kind of sham paradises, such as the Hungarian house in Part 3. Even when Magdalena comes out of prison, she spends very little time at her mother's house before immediately giving it up to return to Carlos's homeless, rootless life.
More than anything even terrorist related I think Carlos is showing how people can only construct a life for themselves with the consent of others. If you are not allowed to, or supported in your goals to be who you want to be, or think you are, then there is little that you can do but submit.
That is also illustrating the interesting shift away from ideology, if it were ever there in the first place, in the film - in a sense Carlos and those around him become a mirror to the worst excesses of capitalism (and politics): international and maybe initially ideologically based at first but eventually having to spend far too much time on brokering deals with shady characters to set up bases, make money and retain influence that any sense of a coherent cause is lost, where the naked ambition (and the turning of an ideological organisation into being used for private ends, as in the Magdalena bombings) is perhaps too cruelly exposed. The implication is that Western society got off lucky in the way that these groups lost their ideological underpinnings and succumbed to day-to-day politicing and the need for the all powerful dollar.
The central OPEC hostage situation is key because it clarifies this theme and hints at the downward spiral to come. The entire sequence illustrates that the biggest problem in taking hostages is not having to keep the police out but to maintain order and not allow the situation to be manipulated from out of your hands when everyone starts attempting to seize the opportunity presented for their own ends. The whole situation ends up being transformed into something entirely different, and not exactly for the better. (The historical timeline in the booklet talks of the endings to the Vienna hostage situation by the Japanese which apparently ended with a similar problem in the hijacked plane not landing in the correct country. The end of that is not dealt with in the film, neither is the aftermath of the Orly Airport hostage situation, but presumably Carlos would have been aware of the outcomes of both and would not have been surprised at problems arising, or is this to suggest that the people involved in these actions disappeared from his consciousness before that point?)
It is interesting that Carlos ends up teaching the tactics of Lawrence of Arabia to students in a classroom in the Sudan - another person who perhaps 'united the tribes' for a brief period. Yet perhaps even that comparison is an attempt at building up myth by association. Although that ties in with the other great Assayas theme of generations passing from one to another and the threat of not being able to keep up with that pace of change, instead getting abandoned to live out your days in one place and as just one thing (even L'eau froide deals with this to some extent in the post-house party disappearance of the heroine, absent in the early morning rather than returning back to real life after the brief escape from it).
I have to admit after being gripped during the first two episodes, my attention began to wander during the final episode after Magdalena left and Carlos travelled to Sudan, where he just continued to repeat yet another loop of the same actions in an even more minor key (perhaps similar to dropping down the 'levels' in Demonlover!), but I think my exhausted and slightly tired reaction to yet another chunk of the film was an appropriate response to that final section which is meant to play as an extended period of inaction and aimlessness waiting (hoping) for the inevitable to come.
|
Login
Register
FAQ
