Wendy Ide
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The French director Barbet Schroeder has always been interested in the faces of evil. This fascination was behind his revealing documentary about Idi Amin in 1974 and the 1990 feature film Reversal of Fortune, which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar for his creepy performance as Claus von Bülow, accused of the attempted murder of his wife, found guilty and then aquitted on appeal. Schroeder’s latest exploration of an ethically dubious life is Terror’s Advocate, a tricky, perceptive documentary portrait of the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, which, thanks to Vergès’s colourful sympathies and affiliations, also plays out as a history of modern terrorism.
Vergès made his name defending the FLN, the organisation whose violent campaign for Algerian independence was dramatised in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. A vocal supporter of the cause, Vergès even went on to marry one of the guerrillas, the beautiful, enigmatic extremist Djamila Bouhired. Vergès continued to court controversy, defending a shady roster of names including Carlos the Jackal, the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and leading figures in the Khmer Rouge, among many, many others. Once asked if he would defend Hitler, Vergès famously replied that he would even defend George Bush, but only if he would plead guilty.
Most intriguing, though, in this life spent as a professional thorn in the side of everyone from human rights supporters to the French Government to the Israeli state, is that Vergès disappeared – completely – from 1970 to 1978 and has never offered any explanation of where he was or what he was doing.
Schroeder is in good spirits when I meet him. He’s nursing a bottle of rather fine red wine. Politely, he offers me a glass, but seems more than capable of tackling it by himself. So, what drew him to the enigmatic, infuriating Vergès? “I was always interested in him throughout my life,” he says. “I was for the independence of the Algerian people when I was 16. I supported them and I was following what he was doing for them. Then when I saw the way he evolved in life, I was most interested. I’m always interested by complex, strange and perverse people.”
Vergès was born in Thailand, the son of a French diplomat father and a Vietnamese mother, and grew up on the French colonial outpost island of Réunion. He has a twin brother who still lives there. But Vergès’ family and personal life are barely touched upon in the film. “I didn’t go into that. That’s why it is not a movie about Vergès himself. He has so many sides, so many cases that he has defended. I concentrated on the history of terrorism. I realised that this is the angle. It’s a unique opportunity: use him as a thread and follow all his clients and cases and that’s how you discover situations that are totally amazing.”
During the making of the film Schroeder unearthed information that was potentially damaging to Vergès’ reputation and to his legal career (now in his eighties, he continues to practise law). There were East German Stasi documents suggesting that, rather than being just a legal representative for Carlos the Jackal, Vergès had in fact a rather more hands-on involvement with his radical causes.
The film also airs theories about what Vergès was doing during the missing years. “He was not a lawyer during those seven years,” says Schroeder. “It’s very difficult to disappear in the modern world except if you disappear into a world which is a secret world. If you disappear into an organisation whose members are risking their life every minute if anything is known. And obviously, he mentioned in the movie that he had a codename . . .”
But Schroeder’s film refrains from judging its subject. In fact the director is in some ways harder on the audience than he is on Vergès. “I am as perverse as him. I invite the audience to say: ‘Yes, this thing of Algeria is beautiful. This he did right. Of course they were using bombs and it was the birth of blind terrorism, but it looks like it was in some way justified because while some people call them terrorists, others call them freedom fighters.’ And the minute that the audience has accepted that, I start turning the screws on them. ‘OK you have accepted that; when are you going to say stop when I show you other possibilities of blind terrorism?’ Once you have accepted that step, you are in big trouble. And the movie puts you in that trouble. It’s very vicious.”
Schroeder has a fiction film-maker’s appreciation of the extraordinary drama of his subject’s life and brings the language of the feature film to the documentary, approaching it as a thriller, with an atmospheric score and progressive, suspenseful revelations about the character of the charming, amusing and dangerously manipulative Vergès.
But how much can you ever know about a man who so skilfully manipulates information to his advantage? Schroeder pauses. “I know two or three things. I know that he is very brave. I know, obviously, that he is very intelligent. I know that he isn’t really interested in money.”
He chuckles affectionately as he talks about the lawyer’s loathing for human rights organisations. “He’s so brilliant that sometimes he even wins against Amnesty International. I don’t think in terms of good or evil but I think if there is one organisation that represents the good in this world it is Amnesty International. And the idea of someone getting at them is pretty scary.”
But what most impresses the director is Vergès’ response to the film itself. Initially, he was damning, saying that it was very sad that so much intelligence was devoted to such a movie, and threatening that Schroeder would be hearing from him soon. “Obviously he was not happy. Then – he’s brilliant – the chess player in him calculates. Now his new way of talking about the movie is that it is an absolute masterpiece – because of his own participation.”
Terror’s Advocate is on limited release from May 16 2008
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