Terror's Advocate

Saturday afternoon - L'Avocat de la Terreure (Terror's Advocate) - in which French film-maker Barbet Schroeder goes on the trail of Jacques Verges, lawyer for some of the world's most controversial figures, including dictators, revolutionaries and terrorists. Schroeder's back catalogue is pretty varied, everything from thrillers (Single White Female) to political documentaries (General Idi Amin Dada - A Self Portrait). Here, he opts for an interview-driven piece, half character portrait, half investigation.

Verges' world is a tangled one. He started his notorious career as a young idealist in Algeria, defending a pretty female freedom fighter who had been tortured by the French authorities. He later married her. While the marriage didn't last, his peculiar career choice did, bringing him into contact with everyone from the Palestinian Liberation Front to the Khmer Rouge to former Nazis. Schroeder sets out to untangle this web through interviews with Verges himself, those who have known him and a veritable army of journalists. Among the interviewees are several figures notorious in their own right, including high ranking Khmer Rouge leaders and even Carlos the Jackal, via phone from prison.

There are a lot of fascinating interviews, but the downside is there are a lot of interviews and, as most of them are in French, a lot of subtitles. Schroeder tries to add context by annotating the interviews with titles and sometimes pictures of people under discussion, superimposed on the background beside the interviewee. That probably works quite well in the original French but in a subtitled film it is confusing, because there need to be titles of the titles as well as the speech and it all becomes a bit crowded.

Crowded is probably not a bad word to describe the film as a whole. While I left with a good sense of Verges himself, it was virtually impossible to follow the timeline of his life or his web of connections. The film jumped from Algeria to Cambodia to Paris, one case to another, one time to another, with the connections sometimes left unsaid for so long I forgot what story I was watching. Sometimes interviews would do the same thing - such as a jolting shift from Verges at his desk, talking expansively while smoking a huge cigar, to Verges standing in an empty court room as if giving witness... but talking about an old relationship, not anything legal. While Terror's Advocate exposes a shadowy world rarely, if ever, seen on film, there are times when its knotted structure increases, rather than cuts through, the mystery surrounding this world. I don't know if I left enlightened or confused.