Entertainment | Film & Cinema
Honest portrayal of an agent of terror
An eponymous film on the terrorist Carlos, by Olivier Assayas, glorifies the man almost as a darker version of James Bond, and gives new dimensions to the myth and truth of ‘The Jackal'
- By Steve Rose, Guardian News and Media Limited
- Published: 00:00 November 5, 2010
- Image Credit: Helayne Seidman/The Washington Post
- The film 'Carlos', in which viewers track the revolutionary, charmingly played by Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez through countless countries, attacks, hijackings and escapes to his eventual arrest in Sudan in 1994, has come under attack for lending terrorism a glamorous face.
Apparently, it is all the Guardian's fault. In 1975, shortly after the international terrorist now known as "Carlos" first gained notoriety by shooting two French detectives and an informer in Paris, Barry Woodhams, boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend of Carlos's, found a bag of weapons belonging to the trigger-happy terrorist in their London apartment. Not trusting the police, he called the Guardian, whose reporter Peter Niesewand came around to inspect, spied a copy of Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal on a bookshelf and concluded Carlos had been reading it. The next day, in its front-page world scoop, the Guardian christened Carlos "The Jackal". The rest is history. Except that the book didn't belong to Carlos at all; it belonged to Woodhams. Carlos the Jackal had probably never even read the book he was named after.
So, yes, the Guardian helped build the myth, but fact and fiction have never been easy to separate when it comes to Carlos the Jackal, whoever he is. He didn't choose the name Carlos either, it turns out. His preferred code name was actually "Johnny". But after that shoot-out in Paris, the only name the police had to give to the press was Carlos, the name on one of his false passports. His actual name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez; his father was a Venezuelan Marxist and called his other two sons Vladimir and Lenin, just to drive the point home. No wonder the guy got a little confused.
Now along comes Olivier Assayas's epic biopic, also titled Carlos, which adds new layers to both the truth and the myth. Originally made as a three-part series for French TV, it is five and a half hours long in its full form (though a half-length feature is also on release in the UK), exhaustively researched and often exhilarating to watch, as we track the fledgling revolutionary, charmingly portrayed by Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez, through countless countries, attacks, hijackings and escapes to his eventual arrest in Sudan in 1994.
Inevitably, Assayas's film/miniseries has been accused of making terrorism look glamorous. "In presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action," complained The Huffington Post, for example.
Similar things were said about Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che biopic or Uli Edel's recent Baader-Meinhof Complex or of the present spate of films nostalgically recalling the heyday of 1970s terrorist chic.
Assayas's Carlos is, it has to be said, a bit of a dude. Despite his supposedly antibourgeois Leftist causes, he is a snappy dresser with a taste for cigars, luxury hotels, women and firearms. He is like a dark-side version of James Bond. Added to which, Assayas has given him a great playlist.
In the past, the director has put Sonic Youth over Maggie Cheung's slinky moves in Irma Vep and cast Canadian hipsters Metric in his film Clean. This time, Carlos struts his stuff to a refined post-punk soundtrack, including early New Order, Wire, the Dead Boys and the Feelies, all of which gives the film a sheen of cool.
"The whole point of the film is showing him as he is at different times but not shying away from him when he has his pop-star moments," Assayas says. "Because that's part of him. He would not have the same image in the media if there was not this pop culture element to him. You have to deal with it."
Like Bond, Assayas's Carlos comes across as both dashingly glamorous and a bit of a knob. He is incredibly vain in a slightly cheesy way: admiring himself naked with a gun in the mirror, dressing up in a Che beret and leather jacket for the notorious 1975 Opec hijacking in Vienna, even checking in for liposuction in his love-handled 1980s era. And, like Bond, he is an agent, not a mastermind. He is the man on the ground to get things done, except that most of the time, he doesn't get them done very well.
"The reality of that operation is that he's involved in some geopolitical game he hardly grasps," says Assayas of the Opec incident, which Carlos treated like his big celebrity breakthrough. "He hasn't designed the operation, he executes a decision made by someone else. He's clearly out of his depth. So I don't think it glorifies him, it just shows him exactly where he is."
Assayas himself was a (law-abiding) Leftist student in Paris at the time of the police killings that brought Carlos to public attention, he says. They took place in the Latin Quarter, just around the block from where Assayas was studying. "It raised all these questions: Why is a Venezuelan helping the Palestinians? How did he shoot those cops? Where did he disappear to? Nobody seemed to be able to catch him or even locate him. Things like that fire the imagination. It's all about the mystery. Of course, once you start to find out the truth — after the end of the Cold War — you realise how disconnected the myth is from the reality."
That didn't stop the mythical Carlos becoming a cultural icon through the Cold War and beyond. In Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy, Carlos is Jason Bourne's arch rival but in the film The Bourne Ultimatum, he is renamed "Paz" and, bizarrely, he is played by Assayas's leading man, Edgar Ramirez. He is the assassin who offs a Guardian journalist at Waterloo station; perhaps that is payback for the Jackal error. Carlos is also immortalised, Warhol-style, in his wraparound shades, on the cover of Black Grape's 1995 album It's Great When You're Straight ... Yeah.
Fact and fiction collided in a more complex way during the making of Carlos, though, when the real-life Carlos, who is still in prison in France, got wind of Assayas's project. Carlos's lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who also happens to be his wife (they married in a Muslim ceremony in prison after he converted to Islam), took the filmmakers to court to attempt to get access to the screenplay to set the record straight, a move which was "legally absolutely incoherent", says Assayas, especially since Carlos never told the truth about many events anyway and is supposedly still awaiting trial next year on others. "I was not really concerned. I did not think he had any kind of case."
Carlos later got hold of the screenplay and wrote a long letter to Edgar Ramirez in which he bizarrely invoked their common ancestor, a conquistador named Ramirez. Assayas is sure the real Carlos has seen the film, though he hasn't commented on it to the French press. In an interview with a German paper, he said he didn't like the nudity. Carlos might still have powerful friends on the outside, though. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, for example, has expressed his admiration, comparing Carlos to Che Guevara. Assayas laughs off any notion of "repercussions". He has only received a few flimsy threats from indistinct "friends of Carlos".
There is a scene near the end of the film, shortly before his arrest, when Carlos is seen educating future terrorists in Sudan on guerrilla tactics, using T.E. Lawrence as an example. Osama Bin Laden would have been in Sudan around the same time. The connection isn't made explicit but the time of Carlos, the international mercenary, is over and that of Bin Laden, the theoretician, is just beginning. "I don't think that what terrorism is about has changed much," Assayas concludes. "Terrorism is about a state sending a message to another state. But in the 1970s, they were militants; they believed in a better world to come after the revolution. Now, [Al Qaida] just uses kids who are fed some absurd mystical ideas where they have access to some kind of paradise in the afterlife. They are not soldiers, they are just ‘martyrs'. That's not something Carlos would have considered."
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