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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
The untold story of the lawyer who defends terrorists
By Nick Roddick, Evening Standard 24.05.07
In the dock: Vergès defending former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, "The Butcher of Lyons", in 1987
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An elderly, vaguely familiar South-East Asian face fills the screen. " Jacques Vergès has known me for 30 years," the man declares in heavily accented French, "and says he considers me polite, discreet - and always smiling." A caption at the bottom of the screen identifies the speaker: "Pol Pot, Brother Number One of the Khmer Rouge." Thus begins Barbet Schroeder's documentary about Jacques Vergès's remarkable career, Terror's Advocate, a film that has stunned Cannes audiences. It is not short - it runs for two-andaquarter hours - and it's not always easy to watch.
The Evening Standard's film critic, Derek Malcolm, called it "an important and revealing film about one of the most frightening men in the world" and the general consensus is that it is one of the most important and powerful documentaries since The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Oph¸ls's 1969 film about France's Vichy government and its collaboration with Nazi Germany. Like Oph¸ls's masterpiece, Terror's Advocate leaves half a century of received ideas, rushed judgments and moral platitudes smouldering in its wake.
"When I'm making a documentary, I want to know who is the bad guy, who is the good guy, where is the happy ending, where is the conflict," Schroeder tells me. "All those questions I ask myself all the time." Schroeder, a slim man dressed in grey, looks for all the world a gentle survivor from intellectual Paris life of the Sixties.
Born in Tehran to Swiss diplomat parents in 1941 and multilingual thanks to a globe-hopping childhood, he is one of the French New Wave's best-kept secrets. He produced many of the early films of Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette; made a pair of hippy-trippy movies in the late 1960s (More and The Valley); directed the seminal documentary Idi Amin Dada. He also worked in mainstream Hollywood, directing films such as Single White Female and Reversal of Fortune (for which Jeremy Irons won an Oscar as Klaus von B¸low) and cameoing in, among others Mars Attacks! and Beverly Hills Cop III.
Colourful though Schroeder's life has undoubtedly been, it seems almost monochromatic by comparison-with that of the subject of his new film. Jacques Vergès, born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and a father from French Reunion, had known Pol Pot in Paris in the early 1950s, when both had been anticolonial student activists - the future Khmer Rouge ideologue working to free Cambodia from French rule, Vergès campaigning for a socialist Thailand.
But where Pol Pot went on to rule his homeland from 1976 to 1979, "purging" one and a half million of his compatriots in the process, Vergès decided that it was time to stop being a student revolutionary and become a lawyer.
He found fame in 1956, defending the two Algerian women responsible for bombing a cafe in the capital. This - "the milk bar bomb", which killed 11 - is featured in the recently re-released classic, The Battle of Algiers, and marked the beginning of the modern era of terrorist attacks against civilian targets, from the IRA bombings of the 1970s through to 9/11 and modern-day Baghdad.
The two bombers - Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif - were captured, tortured and pleaded guilty. Vergès defended them, launching in the process another key strand of modern history: the manipulation of the media as a means of influencing justice.
Vergès realised he had no chance of gaining the sympathy of the court - the Minister of Justice had already privately "guaranteed" a double death sentence. So the young lawyer, barely in his thirties, goaded the judge, the prosecutors and the gallery, knowing that their reactions would make headlines around the world.
Djamila and Zohra were duly sentenced to death, but the French
government was finally obliged to give in to a storm of international pressure and they were eventually freed. Djamila went on to marry Vergès.
If this is all there was to the advocate's career, he would be a fascinating figure. But there is more. After espousing a number of other fashionable Left-wing causes, Vergès disappeared from view, from 1970 to 1978, re-emerging with a very different client list. He defended members of Germany's Red Army Faction, not to mention Carlos the Jackal (with whom Stasi documents indicate he held a number of meetings that could link him to, among other things, the Entebbe hijacking).
Most notoriously, Vergès defended Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons" and was even part of Slobodan Milosevic's defence team in The Hague. At all events, he no longer seemed to be playing on the side of the angels.
"He shows the flip side of contemporary history," argues Schroeder. "He is like a character out of a novel or a movie - extremely intelligent and with real elements of mystery about him. Add to this his fantastic client list and you have a pretty exciting pageturner."
Terror's Advocate is certainly the cinematic equivalent of a good spy novel. Indeed, some of the early Algerian documentary footage, little or none of it seen before, is worth the price of admission alone.
Vergès gave Schroeder 20 hours of candid interview, which makes up the core of the film; the rest is extracts from more than 100 other interviews, from Djamila Bouhired onwards. So how does Vergès himself feel about the film? "Oh," chuckles Schroeder, "he thinks the movie is very good - but only because of him!"
There is, of course, more to it than a character study of Vergès. The theme is that the legal system requires an advocate to go to the very limits for his client. To that end, Schroeder says, "I would never criticise a lawyer for defending anybody", even though he feels that Vergès has crossed the line recently, most notably in a speech in Belgrade urging the Serbian government not to hand over its war criminals to The Hague.
"That contradicts everything else he has ever said," the director insists. "But, even so, I don't think he is a monster. It's just the way of the world. I mean, Vergès has said he'd even defend George Bush, provided he could argue that Bush only did what he did because he was not very intelligent."
• Terror's Advocate will premiere in the UK at the London Film Festival.
