Cinema
• Web without the spider
Christopher Hudson
Plot ('A ' Curzon) is a relentlessly gripping and exciting political thriller, the best of its kind since Z, or possibly The Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. Like these it is a Continental film with subtitles and a French cast; I can't think of a single British political thriller to match any of them.
An important political figure, Sadie!, exiled to Geneva as a dangerous radical, is becoming the focus of revolutionary discontent. The French secret service, in consort with the CIA, decide they have to liquidate him. For this he has to be lured to Paris, where his old political rival, Colonel Kassar, is Minister of Home Affairs. A French journalist called Darien is blackmailed into arranging this. He knew Sadiel in Algeria and is trusted by him. The bait is to be a television programme to be put out by an American. network on which Sadiel can state his views to an international audience. Sadiel accepts it. In Paris a lunch is arranged with Darien, the French television producer Garcin, and Howard the American journalist. Before he can get there, Sadiel is kidnapped. Darien witnesses what follows. His conscience is finally stirred, and he decides to make public what he knows — if he can find any uncorrupted sources to turn to.
I shan't give away any more of the plot: but the picture should be clear. All the shaping forces in French society — the political, legal, police, press and broadcasting systems — are engaged in a conspiracy, a polite, ruthless, efficient conspiracy, to maintain the economic stranglehold of Western capitalism over the nations of the developing world. The net is tight; very few people manage like Darien and his girlfriend Eliith (gauchiste de luxe remarks a secret serviceman dismissively) to slip through. The dialogue and realistic details of Plot add up to a convincing indictment of a not wholly imaginary situation — except for one central and characteristic element.
This is the presentation of Sadie!, on whom the premise of the whole plot rests. He is the Catiline stereotype of the radical hero, summoned from exile to lead his poor and hungry to the promised land. Handsome, sincere, intelligent, forceful, patently honest with himself and others, Sadiel is too good to be true. What kind of reforming policies would he instigate? For a film so specific and so justifiably outspoken in other areas (it is based on the kidnapping and assumed assassination of Ben Barka) this is a relevant question. Yet Yves Boisset, the director, is content to portray Sadiel tout court as a lamb thrown to the wolves. He talks vaguely about a 'new 'government for the people, Kassar out, a clean sweep — at any attempt to pin him down properly he launches into rhetorical gallicisms about returning to "smell the orange trees" and to see "the light shining in the faces of our workers " as they are given instructive texts to read. Few pertinent questions are asked him. "Mightn't you be going back into a trap?" asks his lawyer in Geneva. "Exile is a trap "replies Sadie!, staring fiercely out of the window; then he launches into another flight of patriotic fancy.
In other words Sadiel is a figurehead, the vacuum at the centre of the wind tunnel. He is a stalking-horse for fine radical postures and brave speeches which, however genuinely conceived, amount to nothing because they are committed to nothing. Gian-Maria Volonte does his best with the part; Jean-Louis Trintignant, stricken conscience incarnate, is Darien, the politicians' little man, a part he played to perfection in The Conformist; and Michel Piccoli, Jean Seberg, Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet add lustre to an excellent cast.
England Made Me (' AA ' ABC 2) could also be described as a political thriller — about a young Englishman who finds himself involved in high-level financial swindlinp in Nazi Germany — but the realpolitik is kept at a distance and the tension is poorly main
tained. This is partly because the director has arbitrarily decided to move the action from Graham Greene's Stockholm to Germany before the last war — a transposition which completely alters the balance of the story.
Our sympathy ought to lie with the Englishman (Michael York doing his Cabaret turn as an innocent abroad). He finds out that the industrial tycoon his sister works for wants to get out to England, double-crossing his government and some of his workers in so doing, and he decides to stop him, even though it means sacrificing his sister's happiness. But in Germany, its Nazi brutalities evident from the outset, the moral ' right ' may equally well lie with the tycoon, who is withdrawing his capital from a corrupt and vicious regime. Individual wicked ness is overweighed by State wickedness. The result? We are confused, our sympathy lapses, and with it our interest in what, in other respects, is a competent and serious, if somewhat stilted, film.
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