Car­los

The his­to­ry of left-wing rad­i­cal­ism is being writ­ten by the van­quished. It’s the sto­ry of a defeat­ed gen­er­a­tion pieced togeth­er from prison cells and safe hous­es. It’s a frac­tured nar­ra­tive of vio­lence and pol­i­tics, resis­tance and rev­o­lu­tion. It’s com­pelling, seduc­tive and dan­ger­ous. In truth, it’s many dif­fer­ent sto­ries entan­gled in a com­plex web of agen­das and ide­olo­gies. But at the cen­tre is the grav­i­ta­tion­al influ­ence of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, bet­ter known as Car­los the Jackal.

Born into a com­mu­nist fam­i­ly in Venezuela and named in hon­our of Lenin, Car­los was an itin­er­ant child. He was edu­cat­ed at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and trained in guer­ril­la war­fare in Cuba. He claimed to have joined the Pop­u­lar Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine in 1970, and spent the next quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry engaged in an urban cam­paign against cap­i­tal­ism, Zion­ism and Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism, turn­ing Europe into a proxy bat­tle­ground for the Mid­dle East.

Car­los and his asso­ciates bombed news­pa­per offices in Paris and banks in Lon­don. They attacked the French embassy in West Berlin and fired rock­ets at Israeli planes in Orly. But it was a raid on OPEC – the Organ­i­sa­tion of the Petro­le­um Export­ing Coun­tries – in Vien­na in Decem­ber 1975 that saw Car­los turn ter­ror­ism into polit­i­cal theatre.

Lead­ing a gang of six PFLP mil­i­tants, he took 60 hostages, com­man­deered the Aus­tri­an tele­vi­sion net­works and even­tu­al­ly flew to safe­ty in Tripoli. After Vien­na, Car­los the Jack­al was no longer a ter­ror­ist – he was a star.

So it’s telling that Olivi­er Assayas’ mus­cu­lar biog­ra­phy should restrict itself to his first name only. This isn’t the sto­ry of the mythol­o­gized folk hero. This is the sto­ry of the man who found him­self at the inter­sec­tion of his­to­ry, when the future was bal­anced on the scales of pow­er and possibility.

Assayas is attempt­ing to remain, if not impar­tial, then self-aware. The film opens with a title card acknowl­edg­ing that much of Car­los’ life remains a mys­tery. The direc­tor has filled in the gaps with an imag­i­na­tive account of his­to­ry, fol­low­ing Car­los on his jour­ney through the rad­i­cal under­ground – from Europe to Pales­tine, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, South Africa, Jor­dan, Yemen, Alge­ria and Sudan.

Here he cross­es paths with a bewil­der­ing array of polit­i­cal fig­ures and intel­li­gence offi­cers as he grad­u­al­ly evolves from a covert oper­a­tive to a polit­i­cal embar­rass­ment after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of glob­al communism.

By neces­si­ty rather than design, the sto­ry of Car­los is a shot­gun his­to­ry of the Cold War. It’s a mon­u­men­tal under­tak­ing for a film­mak­er, one that Assayas orig­i­nal­ly deemed too big for cin­e­ma. This 164-minute the­atri­cal cut is just a taste of the five-and-a-half-hour ver­sion that ran on French TV and closed the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in May. And although it con­tains enough detail to fill an exam paper on inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, the joins do show.

Inter-titles help us keep track of names, dates and places that would oth­er­wise become con­fus­ing (and occa­sion­al­ly do any­way). But the repeat­ed tac­tic of fad­ing to black between scenes cre­ates the impres­sion that Assayas – along­side edi­tors Luc Barnier and Mar­i­on Mon­nier – has sim­ply dumped vast amounts of the film onto a cut­ting room floor.

What we’re left with is a biopic that pro­vides a notable con­trast to oth­er films that revis­it the era. Though Car­los can’t help but evince a cer­tain rad­i­cal chic – all whiskey, cig­a­rettes, leather jack­ets and side­burns – it avoids the gauche glam­or­i­sa­tion of Uli Edel’s The Baad­er Mein­hof Com­plex, a film that was intox­i­cat­ed by machine guns and micro skirts.

But if Assayas offers the more seri­ous inter­ro­ga­tion of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary impulse – direct­ly address­ing the seduc­tive qual­i­ties of the ter­ror­ist lifestyle, ​“to brush against dan­ger but nev­er touch it,” as Car­los puts it – his film also suf­fers for it. Car­los lacks the ener­gy and charis­ma that enlivened Jean-François Richet’s Mes­rine – a film that skimmed the con­text to focus ruth­less­ly on character.

Part of that can be attrib­uted to the fact that there’s sim­ply so much plot to nav­i­gate. We join Car­los in his ear­ly days in Paris, the com­mit­ted sol­dier whose idea of glo­ry lay ​“in the duty accom­plished in silence, for the sole sat­is­fac­tion of act­ing in total agree­ment with our con­science, work­ing for a uni­ver­sal cause.” We see him kill for the first time, mur­der­ing two French agents and a Lebanese infor­mant in calm cold blood.

We fol­low him to the Yemeni train­ing camps of the PFLP and from there across the world and back – through the OPEC spec­ta­cle and Saddam’s Iraq to the fright­ened, fad­ed days shut­tling back and forth across an unwel­com­ing Mid­dle East. But Assayas can’t help but assem­ble the film with a mech­a­nis­tic qual­i­ty – at times it feels more like a lec­ture than a liv­ing, breath­ing piece of cinema.

An over-stuffed nar­ra­tive is the inevitable by prod­uct of the film’s resiz­ing from small screen to large. More prob­lem­at­ic is the issue of Venezue­lan actor Édgar Ramírez in the piv­otal role of Car­los him­self. Despite his impres­sive phys­i­cal­i­ty – gain­ing and los­ing weight dra­mat­i­cal­ly to embody Car­los’ nar­cis­sism and the uneasy entan­gling of sex and vio­lence that defined him as a char­ac­ter – Ramírez sim­ply isn’t mag­net­ic enough to drag you with him through the long stretch­es where intro­spec­tion and expo­si­tion take the place of action. For all his com­mit­ment, Ramírez is no Vin­cent Cassel.

And yet there’s an awful lot to admire about Car­los. At its best, it pos­sess­es a clar­i­ty and inten­si­ty that lend the film an unsen­ti­men­tal edge. The OPEC raid in par­tic­u­lar reveals both the cyn­i­cism and the bru­tal­i­ty that under­pinned so much of the rad­i­cal left’s rhetoric about free­dom and jus­tice. These were local vendet­tas played out on a glob­al scale, with a cal­lous dis­re­gard for the val­ue of human life. And yet there’s some­thing about the era that seems almost quaint in hind­sight. ​“I’m a sol­dier, not a mar­tyr,” says Car­los in a rebuke to his PFLP han­dlers that has an omi­nous resonance.

In the end, Car­los became a rel­ic of his­to­ry. He had been a tool, tol­er­at­ed for his use­ful­ness but blind­ed by van­i­ty. As reflect­ed in Ramírez’s tired eyes, his fate could almost be trag­ic but for the destruc­tion he left behind and the destruc­tion he might have caused had he been free to see the resur­gence of Islam­ic terrorism.

Assayas has cre­at­ed a biopic that nei­ther flat­ters nor deceives. What it lacks in pas­sion it makes up in ambi­tion, but the very scale of the task is pro­hib­i­tive. Despite the abun­dance of his­tor­i­cal detail, there is the nag­ging sense that some­thing is miss­ing; some small moment amidst these great events that might have unlocked the inte­ri­or life of a com­plex and mys­te­ri­ous man. As it is, both Ilich Ramírez Sánchez and the Jack­al remain an enigma.