CARLOS (Mongrel, 2010) D: Olivier Assayas, w/ Edgar Ramirez, Nora Von Waldstätten. Rating: NNN DVD package: NN Rating: NNN
If you can get past the first one, this three-movie account of the rise and fall of 70s and 80s career terrorist Carlos delivers considerable tension and a surprising story arc.
In movie one, young Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Edgar Ramírez) is living in Paris, talking Marxism-Leninism and running small errands for a pro-Palestinian terrorist cell. He graduates to an assassination, which he bungles, and tossing a bomb. He kills a pair of cops and goes on the run. We don’t know, or care, much about him.
The second movie picks up the pace with the hostage-taking of a dozen energy ministers and an escape in a commandeered jet. Carlos and the other characters emerge as people. Scheming, negotiations, high drama and suspense abound.
The third movie feels almost like a John le Carré thriller. Carlos is being run by various intelligence services and thrown out of one country after another when he’s no longer useful.
Ramírez makes Carlos watchable by having him try, and fail, to hide his real emotions. Ultimately, the man comes across as a shallow, vainglorious creep. But as director Olivier Assayas points out in the cursory making-of doc, Carlos’s private life is largely unknown, so what we see here is fiction.
EXTRAS Making-of doc. Widescreen. Multilingual audio. English, French subtitles.