For some time now, in films such as Les Destinees Sentimentales, Demonlover and Summer Hours, the critic-turned-director Olivier Assayas has been concerned with dramatising the ways the world has come to turn in our globalised era. Carlos, Assayas's new study of the Venezuelan terrorist and international playboy Ilich Ramirez Sanchez - a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal - boasts a full supporting cast of German revolutionaries, Middle Eastern dignitaries, KGB bigwigs and Red Army footsoldiers, and in doing so, proposes terrorism as a prototypical form of globalisation - a series of secret backroom deals, hostile takeovers, short-lived mergers between secretive groups with vaguely tesselating interests. (Implicit in this, of course, is the critique that globalisation is simply a more respectable, far-reaching form of terrorism.)Carlos was initially conceived as three full-length films for the French broadcaster ARTE; an abridged two-and-a-half-hour version has been made available to international distributors along with an unexpurgated 338-minute cut, and it may be that the richness of the project's detail only fully emerges in this latter version. A opening title card suggests much of what we're about to see is to be understood as no more than speculative inquiry - Carlos was such a slippery character he would only be charged with some of these atrocities, and this being relatively recent history, not all of the relevant documents have yet been declassified - yet it's clear the film is some kind of return to Assayas's journalistic roots: brilliantly researched by the director with his co-scenarist Dan Franck, it's a rigorous feature in the longer form, where I'm guessing the abridgement will have been heavily subbed.
The first section documents how Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) first hitched his wagons to those pro-Palestine forces seeking to counter increased (and increasingly bloody) Zionist activity in Europe during the 1970s, a move interspersed with scenes in which the soon-to-be-Jackal sets out his personal philosophy during assignations in cafés with a selection of sexy señoritas. This commitment to the cause comes to a halt on the Rue Toullier in Paris in June 1975, in the living room of a group of self-described "internationalist militants". "Non-violent," one of the group adds, shortly before Carlos pulls out a revolver and shoots the three cops and the Arab informant who've come to meet him there - a pretty definitive break from the political mainstream, I'd say. The remaining two parts - dealing with the siege on the OPEC conference in December 1975, an event that marked the Jackal's arrival on the world stage; and then with the betrayals that led to his eventual capture and arrest - chart Carlos's decline into celebrity freelance hellraising, exporting a brand of terror so indiscriminate in its allegiances that each new act served only to betray his original ethos: that "behind every bullet, there will be an idea".
Comparisons with Soderbergh's Che diptych are inevitable, and revealing. It's clear from Assayas's film that Carlos bought wholesale into the Che myth: he got the beret, grew the beard, even smoked the same cigars. Yet the Jackal came to grow cocky and (perhaps due to the cover he received from certain authorities) complacent, not to mention sloppy; what awaited him wasn't the heroic martyrdom he expected, but a prison cell much like any other. Assayas makes Carlos's activities involving and cinematic, but whole stretches of this story could be taught in a How Not To Be An International Terrorist class: comically inept rocket attacks on departing El-Al jetliners (very Four Lions, this), a ransom demand in the wake of the OPEC siege that sticks the Jackal with the wrong aircraft for a clean getaway. So hyped is the central figure with revolutionary fervour that he seems to overlook the basics of planning (where Che, as Soderbergh showed, marched meticulously to his doom), and the film prompts waves of amazement that he got away with it for as long as he did. (Carlos was only arrested in 1994, and convicted three years later.)
Recent works such as Mesrine and The Baader-Meinhof Complex - characters from which you could well imagine making crossover appearances here - have plunged us into the charged, polyglot political milieu of the 1970s and 80s, although commercial demands meant these films often had to dash through the finer dialectical detail, or omit it altogether. It seems perverse to write this of a five-and-a-half-hour film, but - despite Assayas's usual fascination with deal-cutting and negotiation, the language of doing business - Carlos is no less pacy, and it keeps its wits about it, too. Certainly the filmmaker made a shrewd casting choice in the hitherto unknown Ramirez, who encapsulates the Jackal's potent dramatic cocktail of moviestar looks, slick ambition and empty boasts; his sudden rages and (dare one say typically Latinate?) chauvinist impulses.
Here is a character playing at being a revolutionary, without being willing to make the personal sacrifices of a Che; who kept on bigging and beefing himself up, until he became just too great a target for the authorities to resist going after. As one of the Jackal's Palestinian contacts observes, "Celebrities are not used to taking orders" - and this ego, along with a growing sense of entitlement and invincibility (two decades as a terrorist - and still they cannot stop me!), may finally have been Carlos's downfall. You may emerge from Carlos (as I did) feeling as though you've had your fill of 70s revolutionary discourse for the time being, but Assayas's film is sharp enough to spot that the most immediate, and most telling, difference between Carlos and Che wasn't, in fact, one of rhetoric or actions, but a tiny choice of wardrobe: Carlos wore sunglasses in photographs, so we couldn't see into his soul.
Carlos opens, in both abridged and extended versions, in selected cinemas from Friday; the DVD is available from November 1.
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