In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
My way of coping with the rather surreal world of contemporary America is to seek out films that address similar issues in different times and places. To paraphrase Timothy Snyder, Americans are not better than people in other parts of the world, but we do have the advantage of learning from their experiences, should we choose to do so. Which brings me to this week’s film, State of Siege by Costa-Gavras, one of his lesser-known but definitely worth watching films.
State of Siege opens with a lengthy shot of a modern Cadillac convertible with Montevideo plates, then pulls back to reveal what can charitably be called an old jalopy from several decades prior. Clearly we’re in a city of haves and have-nots, and how you feel about inequality (and where you imagine yourself on the social scale of the world of this film) will color how you interpret what happens in this film. That Cadillac is important for another reason as well—it contains the corpse of an American, Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) who, judging by the national day of mourning declared in his honor and the elaborate state-funded funeral he is granted, was a very important person indeed. The pews reserved for university rectors are curiously empty, however, and the archbishop is not present, which suggests that maybe Santore was not entirely the wholesome family man as presented in publicity releases.
It’s no secret that State of Siege is based on the 1970 kidnapping and assassination of Dan Mitrione (Montand’s character). In the film, Santore is identified as working for USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development), which sounds like a nice organization that helps the poor and unfortunate achieve a better life.* In fact, Santore’s (and Mitrione’s) specialty was training police and security personnel in torture methods and counter-insurgency tactics, some of which are graphically presented in this film (so watching this film is not recommended for the faint of heart).
Most of State of Siege is composed of a long flashback that fills in the details about Santore’s activities and how he came to be kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaros, a revolutionary Marxist guerilla group. Costa-Gavros doesn’t stack the deck unfairly: Santore appears to be an intelligent and reasonable person (when he’s not actively torturing people), as do the Tupamaros and their leader Hugo (Jacques Weber) (when they’re not kidnapping people at gunpoint). The local government officials and USAID staff come off less well, in part because they think they can hide their crimes behind a veil of euphemisms and nobody likes a BS artist. It’s easy to focus on the wrong done to Santore, particularly if you’re prone to thinking of behavior as individual acts independent of context (and when the role is played by an actor as charming as Montaud), but given that he was voluntarily aiding a corrupt government we have seen committing acts of extreme violence against its own citizens, can Santore really be considered innocent?
Like many of Costa-Gavras’ films, State of Siege is presented so plainly that it feels almost like a documentary (particularly the scenes featuring a journalist played by O.E. Hasse, some of which include voice of God narration) and I mean that as a compliment. A Hollywood treatment of the same story would probably turn it into an action thriller with lots of bullets flying, a ridiculously attractive cast and a soundtrack that tells you how to feel, and wrap it up with condemnation of the lawless terrorists and glorification of the good old U.S.A. Which is exactly the kind of movie that I wouldn’t bother watching but would probably make big bucks at the multiplexes. Anyway, if you’re looking for the latter type of movie, you’ve been warned. | Sarah Boslaugh
* To be fair, some USAID activities today do indeed provide direct aid, including lifesaving food support and medical care, to people in other countries, or they did until their funding was cut. But Orwellian doublespeak is an old tradition: before the name change, Mitrione’s department was called the Public Safety program of the International Cooperation Administration.
Spine #: 760
Technical details: 121 min.; color; screen ratio 1l66:1; French.
Edition reviewed: DVD.
Extras: Video interview ( in English) of Costa-Gavras by film scholar Peter Cowie; NBC broadcast excerpts covering Dan Mitrione’s kidnapping and death (which provide a useful reminder of how these events were framed for the American public, most of whom didn’t know enough to make their own independent evaluation); the website also mentions an essay by journalist Mark Danner, but that was missing from the library copy I viewed.
Fun Fact: At first I thought the overwhelming whiteness of the characters in this film was just an expression of movie conventions, but it turns out that the population of Uruguay is over 85% white (vs. 58% for the U.S.), due to most of the indigenous population being entirely wiped out by the European colonizers in the 19th century.
Parting Thought: State of Siege was shot in Chile, but several clues put the location as Uruguay (various visual clues reference Montevideo, the Tupamaro flag is seen and the organization is mentioned once, plus the story parallels something that really happened in Uruguay). Did Costa-Gavras, who co-wrote the film’s scenario with screenwriter Franco Solinas, assume anyone watching this film in 1972 would put the pieces together, or was the location left purposely vague to imply that this story could have happened in any of a number of places?
