Review of Carlos (2010) by Mike M — 01 Sep 2011

Brilliantly researched by the director with his co-scenarist Dan Franck, it's a rigorous feature in the longer form, where I'm guessing the abridgement will have been heavily subbed... Recent films such as "Mesrine" and "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" - characters from which you could well imagine making crossover appearances here - have plunged us into the charged polyglot political milieu of the 1970s and 80s, although commercial demands meant that they often had to dash through the finer dialectical detail of their histories, or omit it altogether.

It seems perverse to write this of a five-and-a-half-hour film, but - despite Assayas's usual fascination with deal-cutting and negotiation, the language of doing business - Carlos is no less pacy, and it keeps its wits about it, too.

Certainly the director made a shrewd choice at the casting stage in the previously unknown Ramirez, who embodies the Jackal's potent dramatic cocktail of moviestar looks, slick ambition and empty boasts; his sudden rages and (dare one say typically Latinate?) chauvinist impulses.

Here is a character playing at being a revolutionary without wanting to make the personal sacrifices of a Che; who kept bigging and beefing himself up, until he became just too great a target. As one of his Palestinian contacts suggests, "Celebrities are not used to taking orders.

" You may emerge from "Carlos" (as I did) feeling as though you'd had your fill of 70s revolutionary discourse for the time being, but Assayas's film is sharp enough to spot that the most immediate and most telling difference between Carlos and Che wasn't in fact one of rhetoric or actions, but a tiny wardrobe choice: Carlos wore sunglasses in photographs, so we couldn't see into his soul.