CARLOS Fighting capitalism with guerilla means is romantic, but doomed to failure.
Olivier Assayas expanded his status as a French director, starting in the 1990s, with international productions, like Irma Vep (with Hong Kong's Maggie Cheung, his ex-wife), demonlover (Denmark's Connie Nielsen), and Boarding Gate (Italy's Asia Argento).
That female-fronted trilogy combines disparate languages and locations, but remain French simply because a Frenchman made them--France also plays a role in this particular protagonist's fate.
With his three-part take on the life of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, AKA Carlos (Édgar Ramírez, The Bourne Supremacy, Ché), Assayas cast a Venezuelan actor to play a Russian-educated Venezuelan terrorist (who prefers to describe himself in militaristic terms like "soldier" and "commando").
Throughout the film, Carlos shuttles between Paris, London, Beirut, The Hague, Vienna, Damascus, Budapest, Tripoli, and other cities in service of the FPLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), East Germany's Stasi, the Syrian Air Force, and the Libyan government. In the process, he collaborates with the Japanese Red Army and German Revolutionary Cells, eliciting praise from Iraqi General--and future President--Saddam Hussein.
In his line of work, it pays to be multilingual, but it also suggests that Carlos has no real home (Assayas leaves his background a blur). As Ramírez plays him, he's passionate, narcissistic, and sexually attracted to ammunition, telling a girlfriend, "Weapons are an extension of my body." (In Vogue, John Powers described Ramírez's performance as "carnal.")
Carlos bombs and shoots up banks, airplanes, drugstores, oil conferences--whatever it takes to halt the Mideast Peace process. During the raid on 1975's OPEC Conference, which takes up the bulk of part two, Assayas has his antihero snort cocaine in the midst of a hijacking. It's a throwaway moment, but it's also a telling move for an avowed anti-imperialist.
Granted, it was probably easy for Carlos to access, and provided a boost of energy for a tired terrorist, but it's the drug of choice for rock stars and stock traders, marking the point at which Carlos loses the plot as the dedicated Marxist embraces the cash-stuffed briefcases his efforts generate.
An opening credit makes it clear that Assayas wasn't aiming for documentary realism, i.e., "The film must be viewed as fiction," but the moments where people sit in rooms, talking and smoking, combined with an absence of CGI keeps a Hollywood feel at bay, even as Carlos becomes an international celebrity. There's action, but it isn't an action movie or a thriller, even though I never knew where things were going, other than that Carlos wouldn't meet his maker (he remains incarcerated in France).
If it lacks the pop-cult buzz of Mesrine or The Baader Meinhof Complex, Carlos doesn't lose itself in strategy like Steven Soderbergh's Ché.
Furthermore, Assayas eschews a traditional score, but keeps the energy up with a selection of post-punk tracks that set the mood rather than reflect the era. It's anachronistic, for instance, that "Dreams Never End" represents Carlos in the first part...though his dreams do eventually end.
If Brian Eno in the 1970s sets the tone for Assayas's Clean, Wire in the 1970s and 1980s ("Dot Dash," "Drill," etc.) serves as the de facto pulse for the subsequent sections, along with songs from the Feelies, A Certain Ratio, Material, Robert Fripp and Eno, and the Dead Boys.
In the end, Carlos gives Ramírez the role of a lifetime (I've admired his work since Tony Scott's underappreciated Domino). It's hard to imagine anyone more perfect, and the actor doesn't put one foot wrong, though his co-stars, who are mostly very good, overact at times. More importantly, though, it's the apotheosis of Assayas's globalization project, a theme running through his work at least since Irma Vep (a similar facility with languages in Clean brought Cheung a best actress award at Cannes).
While demonlover and Boarding Gate were fairly chilly propositions, Carlos, like Cold Water and Summer Hours--otherwise very different films--gets the balance right. You may not like this whoring, girlfriend-stealing, cop-killing autodidact, but he's far too relatably, recognizably human to hate.
Ultimately I realized that the disconnected images I had of Carlos had an interesting, even fascinating connection that somehow paralleled the evolution of Western leftism in those years. So I felt it was the fate of one man and, in a certain way, the story of one generation, plus a meditation on time, history, fate and issues more universal than the specific history of Carlos. -- Olivier Assays to The New York Times
Carlos continues at the Northwest Film Forum through 11/7 in three parts, beginning at 5:30pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Images from OutNow!