Cinema: Echo Chambers of Horror

Two things can go no farther than Z: the alphabet and the ideological film. Traditionally, political movies tend to be newsreels with strident sound tracks or windy polemics pretending to be conversation. Scenarist Jorge Semprun (La Guerre Est Finie) knows better. So does Director Costa-Gavras (Sleeping Car Murder), who correctly calls Z an “adventure film” against a system.

The system is the present Greek government, and the adventure is the extrapolation of an incident in Athens, circa 1963. A Spock-like physician-politician (Yves Montand) addresses an antimilitary rally. As he leaves the assembly hall, he is viciously clubbed by hired assassins as a truck simultaneously brushes past him. Three days later, without regaining consciousness, he dies. Officials immediately offer smug condolences about the “regrettable traffic accident.” But a few bits of offal stick to the whitewash. A journalist coaxes a witness into a confession; an alibi springs an irreparable leak. The incorruptible public prosecutor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) remains unswayed by police and government threats. Ascending clues like the rungs of a ladder, he finally commands a chilling view of the assassination: Greece is a sunstruck nightmare, its police and army officers crypto-fas-cists, its government a palace of corruption. Slowly, he begins to indict the nation’s entire power structure for political murder.

In its anthology of revelations and confessions, Z employs no metaphors and few euphemisms. It needs none. The time is yesterday, and the location is the birthplace of democracy. The ironies are only too severe, and the tragedy only too profound. The film’s end is a simple, stark report: the April 1967 coup restored the corrupt police officials and gave their homicidal accomplices token sentences. The prosecutor was forced to resign and go into exile.

Memories of Zapruder. By definition Z is a polemic. The film plainly exaggerates the horrors of the present Greek scene. But it is a po’emic that was created, not just felt, partly by using dialogue that is more like lyrics than speech. According to traditionalist historians, there is no history, only biography. Z reverses the proposition; there are only forces, not men. Accordingly, the leading roles are the sort one would find on a chessboard. In an essentially small part, Montand is again Camus-like, at once involved and lofty. Trintignant, more through skill than script, turns the abstract notion of justice into a driven man who would shatter his career rather than bend the truth.

In its advocacy of the conspiracy theory of government, Z provides echo chambers of horror. The series of stop motion pictures of the Deputy’s death revives involuntary memories of the Zapruder film. The coincidence of alleged complicities recalls the farther shores of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans fantasies. But essentially Z is grinding its ax not for politicians but for politics. Tyranny is always better organized than freedom; beneath the idea of order—in Eastern Europe, says the film, as well as in Greece—truly anarchic forces are loosed upon the world. The Greek letter Z is a symbol for “he still lives.” In this case, Z refers to the murdered Deputy. But it is also the spirit of revolt against a stifling government that has banned, in addition to miniskirts, Twain, Chekhov, Beckett, and of course Z. As a work of art, Z can live without Greece. The question is, can the Greeks truly live without Z?

* In fact, the filmmakers make a point of stressing the similarities between history and their fiction. In a preface signed by Costa-Gavras and Scenarist Jorge Semprun it is announced unhesitatingly that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional.”