sound and fury
by Douglas Messerli
Jorge Semprún and Costa-Gavras (screenplay,
based on the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos), Costa-Gavras (director) Z /
1969
Watching Costa-Gavras’ Z yesterday
afternoon, I was suddenly reminded of my first viewing, probably in late 1969
after I returned from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin where I was a student;
and I suddenly realized that that movie alone was probably the reason why I had
for so long been a sort of inexplicable admirer of political thrillers over the
years such as, Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s
Men (1976), JFK (1991), and others.
All
of these films shared less an interest in the actual machinations of politics
than they did in exploring the mysteries of political cover-ups and in the way
those in power have of controlling and altering our perceptions of reality.
Alas, in most of these films—with perhaps the exception of All the
President’s Men—in one way or another the forces of political evil win out
over the good. But winning the battle for knowledge seems far superior to
winning the war against injustice, which any political cynic will tell, returns
to cultures in a fairly cyclical pattern. Someday soon we will be watching a
film about how Donald J. Trump was brought to justice, or, perhaps, how this
lies and terrifying behavior were finally publicly revealed only to have them
covered over again with alternate truths.
Both
possibilities happened after of the assignation of Greek politician Grigoris
Lambrakis, who in 1963 was publicly “murdered” by members of the
then-government supported CROC (The Christian Royalist Organization against
Communists) by being run-down by a small service vehicle and clubbed to death
in the square in front of the small space in which he had just delivered a
speech.
Roger Ebert, a great admirer of the film, nicely summarizes the plot:
“It is told simply, and it is based on fact.
On May 22, 1963, Gregorios Lambrakis was fatally injured in a "traffic
accident." He was a deputy of the opposition party in Greece. The accident
theory smelled, and the government appointed an investigator to look into the
affair.
His
tacit duty was to reaffirm the official version of the death, but his
investigation convinced him that Lambrakis had, indeed, been assassinated by a
clandestine right-wing organization. High-ranking army and police officials
were implicated. The plot was unmasked in court and sentences were handed down—stiff
sentences to the little guys (dupes, really) who had carried out the murder,
and acquittal for the influential officials who had ordered it.
But the story was not over. When the Army junta staged its coup in 1967,
the right-wing generals and the police chief were cleared of all charges and
"rehabilitated." Those responsible for unmasking the assassination
now became political criminals.”
Strangely, by the end one discovers the truth at the very moment it is
cast aside as lies and misperceptions by the military coup. The ground gives
way constantly, with nothing but memory to hold on to. It is no wonder that
filmmaker Oliver Stone cites the work as inspiration to his own filmmaking,
that Steven Soderbergh lists it was his inspiration for Traffic, and
William Friedkin perceived how to shoot his The French Connection
through watching Costa-Gavras’s movie.
In
retrospect, however, as Slant Magazine’s Bill Weber points out:
“Of the triumvirate of stars in the cast, only
Montand makes a lingering impression as the pacifistic martyr; as his grieving,
semi-estranged wife, Irene Papas could have been billed as Special Guest
Mourner, weeping and sniffing her departed husband’s aftershave lotion. When
the film’s second hour shifts to the pursuit of the truth by a straitlaced but
zealously fair-minded magistrate, Jean-Louis Trintignant hides behind his
glasses, ostentatiously striving for dullness.”
Far
more egregious is this film’s homophobia. Somewhere back in the 1930s, when
filmmakers were forced to abandon their mockery of gay men as pansies and
writers and directors began slipping LGBTQ figures into their works through
code, an even larger number of filmmakers introduced gay figures into their
works as villains and other figures who, their films argued, deserved the
punishments, often death, meted out to them by film’s end—precisely the point
of Vito Russo’s well-documented The Celluloid Closet, in which Z
is cited as yet another example.
The heavy villains of this work, the actual killers, are the Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern duo of Vago (Marcel Bozzuffi) and Yago (Renato Salvatori), based presumably on the real-life figures of
Emmanouel Emmannouilidis and Spyro Gotzamanis. Yago, the driver, is merely a
mean-spirited thug. But Vago is presented in far more subtle manner—which I
totally missed as a 22-year-old viewer of this movie, as I am sure did many
others at the time—as a homosexual and a pedophile (probably not something the
writers and viewers of the day would have thought to separate out). Semprún and
Costa-Gavras first make this clear in a scene in which the two, forced by the
line of policemen blocking off the entrance of the kamikaze vehicle into the
square, are forced to temporary stop in their tracks. As they pause, Vago can
be see looking up, a smile of pleasure on his face as the camera moves first to
Yago, who proclaims, “One track mind,” as the camera moves back to Vago, still
smiling as he answers “Yes,” before panning up to show us a teenage boy in his
underwear standing on his balcony looking in the direction of the square from
where the speech is being broadcast on speakers.
The
next scene confirming Vago’s homosexuality is when he suddenly shows up to the
offices of a newspaper editor immediately after the attack on Lambrakis.
Clearly well-known to its staff, he sits on the edge of an editor’s desk,
openly admitting his involvement in the beating, and wants him to include his
name in the paper to let his friends know. Clearly, one of the CROC members,
the editor demands he immediately get over to the hospital so that the press
and police know members of both sides were beaten. When word gets out that
Lambrakis is dying, Vago returns to the editor, this time as the newspaper is
going to press, begging that he retract his name, having realized the
foolishness of his wanting to be known for his involvement. When the editor agrees,
he smiles, waiting evidently with the intention of awarding the editor his
sexual pleasures. But the editor, looking around, whispers, “Not here. Not
now,” as Vago goes off quite pleased with himself, enough to click up his heels
in delight as he moves to the small bar across the street where a handsome
young man is busy on the pin-ball machine.
Stationing himself to the side, he gradually moves his hand over to
touch the boy’s hand as he pushes the machine button. When the boy doesn’t
respond negatively, he does it again, this time much more obviously, clearly,
as the camera moves off, ready and poised to move his fingers over the boy’s
hand in the very next moment.
As
if the director hadn’t yet made his case for just how much of a sociopath Vago
is, he shows him in a later scene, another club in hand, prowling the halls of
the hospital into which he has finally checked himself, ready and proud to do
in a coffin-varnisher, Nick (Georges Géret) who is determined to testify about
Yago’s involvement in what is now described by the press as a murder.
And
finally, called to testify before the Magistrate, Vago admits to four previous
convictions, illegal possession of a weapon, abuse and slander, theft,
and…rape. When the Magistrate questions him about the last, his answer says
everything that you may have missed previously: “It wasn’t really. I was a boy
scout camp counselor.”
Despite the ugly attitudes behind this figure, he remains, nonetheless,
perhaps the most entertaining figure, akin to Nick the stool pigeon, in the
entire movie, offering up a constant undercurrent of the comic in an otherwise
overtly serious drama. Friedkin—well known for his stereotypical and homophobic
portraits of gay men through works such as The Boys in the Band and Cruising—cast
the actor, Bozzuffi in a similar role in The French Connection.
In
the end, there also something very sad about this work since is truly full of
“sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Although the rightists were eventually
overthrown, nearly all of those who had attempted to bring about justice
eventually were killed in improbable accidents or brought down by governmental
thugs. Seven of the witnesses died, all by incredible accidents, before trial.
The cousins Vago and Yago served only short prison terms. The charges against
the generals were dropped. On the left, Deputy George Pirou died of “stroke” as
he was transported in a police van. Other major figures of the leftist movement
were exiled or fell from high rise buildings. The list of banned people and
things at the film’s end suggest just how cold new world was without any
culture: Sophocles, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Euripides, Aragon, Trotsky,
Aristophanes, Ionesco, Sartre, Albee, Pinter, The Beatles, the homosexual
writings of Socrates, the freedom of the press, Beckett, Dostoevsky, Chekov,
Gorki, Who’s Who, modern music, popular music, modern mathematics, and
the letter Z, which was used by the opposing party to mean “He lives.”
That the US government went on to support the junta is almost just as
frightening as the movie itself.
Los Angeles, April 12, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April
2023).
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