[This review also originally published on Cinescene as well as in my regular Filmleaf coverage of the NYFF.]

ÉDGAR RAMÍREZ IN ASSAYAS' CARLOS

Cool revolutionary terrorist mercenary seducer dude

The French director Olivier Assayas, former husband of the Hong King diva Maggie Chung, has made films as widely separated in style as Irma Vep, demonlover, Clean, and Summer Hours (fantasy, scifi, rehab, family drama). This year he has turned his talents successfully to the TV miniseries. Carlos, which is in three segments totaling 5 1/2 hours, is about the Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whose daring exploits made him into the media star who later became known as Carlos the Jackal. And the result is thrilling, informative, and fun.

Carlos has the many layers and multiple languages of the British series Traffik, but its subject matter, a succession of terrorist exploits with like-minded cohorts followed by flight and eventual capture, is closer to Uli Edel's recent feature The Baader Meinhof Complex. Except Assayas' focus is on one guy. And what a guy. Carlos, AKA Ilich, speaks Spanish, English, French, German and Arabic. He's dashing, super-macho, good-looking, brave, smart, and catnip to the ladies. He knows how to take charge, and he knows how to have a good time. The excellent cast is headed by Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez, who is more than equal to the task, as forceful with annoying cops and security officials as he is with OPEC honchos and pretty women. Much of the pleasure of the film is watching Ramírez in action.

Another pleasure is the authenticity. There are over a dozen national venues involved including France, Hungary, East Germany, Austria, Lebanon, South Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Sudan, nine languages spoken, and there's never a false note. Though English is the main language heard, unlike the Hollywood version of such proceedings, Carlos is a film where Arabs play Arabs, and they have the right accents. It's enjoyable to see Ramírez sliding smoothly back and forth from German to French to Spanish to Arabic to English as the occasion arises. Ramírez' Carlos if not the coolest dude ever, comes pretty darn close. (Of course he is also a killer, and he suffers a decline.) This actor played in Soderbergh's Che but he didn't get to play Che, and that was a steal. What Todd McCarthy wrote was "Édgar Ramírez inhabits the title role with arrogant charisma of Brando in his prime." That's only a slight exaggeration.

Speaking of Soderbergh, though this sprightly study has none of the vanity project air of his Che, there is a similar problem of a format too unwieldy for theatrical viewing. This should be seen and is best enjoyed as TV drama in three spaced-apart segments. Instead it came out first at Cannes and was watched and reviewed there as a film. IFC in the US is to make it available in its full length and in a 2 1/2-hour shortened version. Critics who have to spend more than half their day watching one film, no matter how good, are likely to complain, and it's not surprising that some have knocked Assayas' extremely accomplished foray into the miniseries genre. Main points: that Carlos' ideology isn't subtle and gets cruder as he ages in the film; that he's crude with women too. Manohla Dargis wrote (from Cannes) that this Carlos is "a militant pinup" (she speaks of his leather and beret outfit for the OPEC caper) but at bottom is "a mercenary, a thug."

Yes, and one might add that the film could benefit from a few less scenes that begin with men lighting up cigarettes -- or cigars, even ones from Fidel's private Havana stock (as Carlos boasts at one point). The nicotine, not to mention the booze, consumption in this movie will wear you out.

I too had to watch the series in basically one long sitting, and that can leave you limp. It's still obviously great stuff; but being able to take a break of a day or a week between segments would make it work a lot better. Maybe in any format the free-lance revolutionary's life ultimately becomes repetitious and fatiguing. But this is a story full of panache. The Jackal has fed into many films already and is reputed to be a source of the Bourne concept, but it seems likely Hollywood will be moved to draw on the character anew after this dashing recreation, and Ramírez might get some plum roles.

Apart from his perhaps simplistic Marxist ideology and sexist dealings with Seventies women's liberationists, Carlos can be accused of being a grand-stander in tireless pursuit of personal fame. Various governmental adversaries or Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) handlers accuse him of such behavior. But despite his self-promotion, womanizing, and love of good whiskey and good cigars, the Venezuelan had lots of training, in economics as well as fighting, and his politics were sincere. He supported the Palestinian cause, and early on is reluctantly accepted by the PFLP's Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour) to carry out terrorist acts against Israel. This becomes his main focus, and leads to his pursuit by many national security services.

The film's first major scene is one in which Carlos is caught with a group of Latin American leftist friends in an apartment in Paris when two French DST counterintelligence agents come in looking for him. He shoots his way out and kills the two agents. This is the crime that leads to his incarceration in La Santé prison two decades later.

The second and longer big sequence is Carlos' most celebrated exploit, in which he and a group of German and Arab cohorts take OPEC's main delegates hostage at a meeting in Vienna in 1975 and try to fly them to Baghdad. The trip is cut short and is seen by the PFLP as a failure , but Carlos takes $20 million in ransom money and the exploit makes him famous. Ramírez's revolutionary outlaw shtick is at its most glamorous and sexy in these scenes. When he talks to the likes of the Saudis' Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani as an equal, it's a pleasure.

Carlos is more effective than some of the other Seventies terrorism films at showing the range of human skills involved; they vary from the German nutcase Nada (Julia Hummer) to faithful allies like Johannes Weinrich (Alexander Scheer), to brilliant leaders like Carlos himself. Seeing this maligned profession from the viewpoint of a practitioner as bold, brave, and talented as Carlos allows one to understand better what it means to live this way. Carlos sees himself as a soldier of the revolution who exists only for his mission and his fellow soldiers. He is not a martyr but serves best by surviving for the next mission. He goes downhill in the end however, as he is rejected by one former Eastern Bloc and Arab ally after another.

The film contains the startling revelation that all countries use terrorists for their own ends. Carlos is traded back and forth from Yemen to Hungary to East Germany to France to Syria to Lebanon to Sudan. In the end he is abandoned by everyone, used up, and sold to the highest bidder. The process leading up to Carlos' delivery to the French is slow and torturous, but it is true. Assayas' Carlos is as instructive as it is entertaining.

Shown first at Cannes out of competition, later on French TV (Canal+). It was bought for US distribution in both short and full length formats by IFC. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. For more details see the Wikipedia articles Carlos (TV miniseries) and Carlos the Jackal. A concurrent profile of Assayas by A.O. Scott in the NY Times Magazine sets Carlos in the context of the director's whole body of work and personal identity.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.