STATE OF SIEGE (Constantin Costa-Gavros, 1972)

U.S. support for South American military dictatorships was a fact of geopolitical life during the Cold War. The U.S., often covertly through the C.I.A., assisted governments in combating insurgents—guerrillas officials branded as terrorists. Today, the U.S. still favors fascist governments over democratic ones since the former accommodate U.S. business interests while the latter oppose exploitation of their people and resources, setting their priority on the people’s welfare. Written beautifully by Franco Solinas and director Constantin Costa-Gavros, Etat de siège is a strong, fascinating film—a better one than Costa-Gavros’s earlier Z (1969)—about a 1970 incident in Uruguay involving the kidnapping, interrogation and killing of a U.S. agent by guerrillas in Montevideo.
     Daniel A. Mitrione, rechristened here Philip Michael Santore, was an Indianan police chief who was supposed to be training Uruguayans in “traffic and communications.” In reality, he trained police, especially in the use of torture. “A premature death,” Mitrione reportedly opined, “means a failure by the technician. It’s important to know in advance if we can permit ourselves the luxury of the subject’s death.” One would never guess the air of Mengele about the man from this statement from the Nixon-Kissinger White House upon news of his death: “Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.”
      Well, an example for Bush and Cheney at least. Uruguay became a place of official terror, with wholesale arrests and imprisonments without due process, the “habitual” use of torture, and death squads.
     Costa-Gavros’s taut mosaic zigzags among different kinds of scenes, including legislative ones, press conferences, and the interrogations in which Tupamaro guerrillas confront Mitrione/Santore with meticulous evidence of actions he keeps denying.
     Yves Montand is magnificent as Mitrione/Santore.

UNITED 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006)

From the United Kingdom, France and the U.S., Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is moving and accomplished—not so stunning, of course, as Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2001), but estimable nevertheless.
     And humane, toward the hijackers—one ought to be prepared for that—as well as the passengers.

REMBRANDT LAUGHING (Jon Jost, 1988)

I cannot say that I am able to follow all the plot elements of Jon Jost’s Rembrandt Laughing. Jost himself has explained that he was aiming to tell the story “without telling the story”—indirectly, elliptically; and some early-Godardian business involving gangsters defeated my comprehension. But what a marvelous movie this is—and one with renewed relevance because of the current crop of anti-evolutionists.
     Rembrandt Laughing is a San Francisco movie as deeply mysterious as Hitchcock’s San Francisco movie, Vertigo (1958); and, again like Vertigo, it is a meditation on human transience. And more: the film meditates on the mind-boggling propensities of time and space as related to the speed of light, and the eternal mystery of cosmos in/against which our mortal scurrying about plays out. Recall the incredible overhead shot of a cup of mysteriously swirling coffee in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)? Jost tenders his version of the shot—and it is even more mysterious in his eye, as the whole galaxy seems to be churning and turning in his coffee (or, perhaps, cocoa) cup. Like Godard, Jost gives the lie to the notion that spirituality requires religious faith. Either filmmaker explores universal mystery without allowing the exploration, or the mystery, to degenerate into some convenient religious explanation that solves the mystery and kills the wonder.
     Friends and friends-of-friends populated Jost’s cast (with one exception), and there wasn’t any script, with the “actors” improvising most everything.
     The framing of the shots in this film! The exquisite use of natural light! The resonant use of the color red throughout! Nearly every shot is fresh, lovely, unexpected. And anchoring Rembrandt Laughing is the unassailable humanity of the two lead characters: a scientist/musician and an employee in an architectural firm—a one-time couple, where the man still is in love with the woman, and the woman has moved on, but not out of the man’s life. They remain united in friendship. Paradoxically, the pair are eternally bonded in Time.