Costa-Gavras (1969)
Z establishes immediately its distinctive rhythm and tone. The brisk opening titles sequence culminates in a knowingly unconventional assurance: ‘Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional’. Adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, the film has a plot inspired by the assassination in May 1963 of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. Its title refers to a slogan – meaning ‘he lives’ – that became popular among Lambrakis’s supporters following his murder at a rally in Salonika. The Greek government at the time was conservative but Z’s chief satirical target is the regime in power when the film was in production. Its tempo chimes with the disorienting speed of political change in Greece in the mid-1960s, culminating in the coup d’état of April 1967 – the year after the publication of Vassilikos’s novel – that brought to power the ‘Regime of the Colonels’. Their military junta remained in charge until 1974. The kinetic energy of Z – a motion picture if ever there was one – also reflects the angry urgency that drove the making of it.
Costa-Gavras’s film was already famous and honoured by the time I began cinema-going in the early 1970s but I’d never caught up with Z until now. It was an interesting coincidence to see it just a couple of weeks after The Death of Stalin. Like Armando Iannucci’s film, Z switches between satiric ridicule and straight political drama but the combination of Costa-Gavras’s strength of feeling and definite, consistent visual style unifies the switches, and both aspects are effective. From the start, the civilian members of the government are ludicrous, their military ‘advisers’ more alarmingly outrageous. The former group listens to a comically dull slide-show lecture on agricultural policy before a security officer takes the floor, to deliver a high-octane address on the government’s programme to combat rising leftism. Costa-Gavras yokes his political commitment and a commercial film-making instinct to brilliant effect: Z is, as well as an eloquent polemic, a first-rate action thriller. At the heart of the narrative is the investigation into the death of the Lambrakis figure, known as ‘the Deputy’, by an examining magistrate (based on the jurist Christos Sartzetakis, who went on to serve as President of Greece between 1985 and 1990). The magistrate doesn’t capitulate, in spite of increasing pressure and threats from the powers-that-be. The audience thus gets the satisfaction of seeing justice done – four senior military police officers, as well as the two right-wing extremist assassins, are indicted – before the film’s epilogue, which summarises the subsequent undoing of justice. Finally, Costa-Gavras scrolls down the screen the long, long list of things banned by the Colonels – including pop music, avant-garde literature, philosophers ancient and modern, and ‘the use of the term “Z” ‘.
Its exceptional speed makes Z at times borderline cartoonish but more often demanding – there’s a lot to take in both visually and verbally. Things sometimes moved too quickly for this viewer to grasp what had happened though at least one instance of this is by design: Costa-Gavras gradually reveals, in swift flashbacks, the details of the Deputy’s assassination. Thanks to Françoise Bonnot’s crackerjack editing and Raoul Coutard’s dynamic cinematography, the film’s action still looks and feels modern, nearly half a century on: the sequence in which the character played by Charles Denner desperately, resourcefully avoids a car that keeps trying to run him down is a fine illustration of this. In comparison, a scene describing the grief of the Deputy’s widow (Irene Papas) now seems conventional. The weakest element of Z is the characterisation of the Deputy – partly a result of admiring sympathy shading into sentimentality, partly a consequence of Yves Montand in the role. Good actor as he was, Montand, a celebrity political progressive of the era, is too comfortably cast as the charismatic, courageous Lambrakis figure. Montand had recently played a not dissimilar hero in Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie (1966), also written by Jorge Semprún.
Jean-Louis Trintignant is superb as the magistrate. Remarkably anonymous in his early scenes, he gradually becomes the most magnetic, as well as morally the strongest, character of the story. Trintignant’s poker face is a powerful instrument of suspense. It keeps you wondering if the unsmilingness is mere professional correctness or a determined means of concealing inner thoughts – keeps you guessing too which way his judgment will go. The film’s producer Jacques Perrin has a key role as an opportunistic photojournalist: his tactics may be dubious but what he captures on camera helps substantiate the magistrate’s findings. Z’s buoyant score perfectly epitomises its political currency and the engagement of the people who made it. At the time the film appeared, Mikis Theodorakis, who composed the music, was under house arrest by order of the ruling junta.
6 November 2017
