SnoopyStyle
Jacques Vergès has been the defense attorney for members of the Khmer Rouge, Algerian FLN, Palestinian PFLP, and other terrorists. It starts with him as a French foot soldier. As a young lawyer, he's contacted by the Algierian resistance and he became their sympathetic disruptive famous lawyer. Using footage from "The Battle of Algiers", it tries to explain the struggle. It's mostly his friends, clients and supporters in this movie.The movie starts with him defending Khmer Rouge leaders and that's really annoying. This is very much an one-sided monologue. It's somewhat interesting to follow his life and career but he's a fanatic. He's not some ACLU lawyer looking to ensure rights of the condemned. This guy has no objectivity or sympathy other than for his clients. It feels like the movie is preaching to the choir. There is also an arrogance to the man that is off-putting. I don't know why he won't reveal where he was for those years. He's there smoking his cigar and I'm sure the documentarians must have asked. It's part of his superiority complex. It's not until the Nazi connections that the movie gets interesting but that takes over an hour to get there. However the movie fails to connect all the dots. This documentary fails to answer some very basic questions about who this guy is and where he comes from. The investigation is incomplete. Then there is the style of the documentary. It is non-stop talking heads make it rather boring. It's like trying to cobble together a narrative with each witness giving one or two sentences. Most docs use a narrator to direct and drive the discussion. This one needs something more than talking heads talking. This feels like a rambling run-on sentence.
Sindre Kaspersen
French-Swiss producer and director Barbet Schroeder's documentary feature is based on his opinions about his main interviewee. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 60th Cannes International Film Festival in 2007, was shot on locations in Algeria, France, Cambodia and Lebanon and is a French production which was produced by producer Rita Dagher. It tells the story about a person of Vietnamese and French origins who was born in Thailand on the 5th of March in 1925, raised on Réunion Island in France, taken to a mass grave by his parents as a ten-year-old, served his initial service as a seventeen-year-old, joined the French Communist Party as a twenty-year-old, studied literature and eastern languages in Paris, France, began studying law as a thirty-year-old after his twin-brother named Paul Vergès was arrested for the murder of a political opponent of his father named Raymond Vergès and as a thirty-two-year-old lawyer was introduced to an Algerian Muslim and political activist named Zohra Drif and asked to defend an Algerian member of the National Liberation Front Algeria named Djamila Bouhired. Distinctly and precisely directed by French-Swiss filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, this finely paced documentary which is narrated interchangeably from multiple viewpoints though mostly from the central person's point of view, draws an informative portrayal of a son, brother, husband, father, anti-colonist and renowned 20th and 21st century author and defense attorney with both French and Algerian citizenship named Jacques Vergès (1925-2013), and his relationship with his clients. While notable for its versatile milieu depictions and reverent cinematography by cinematographers Caroline Champetier and Jean-Paul Perrard, this narrative-driven story about the history of international terrorism and France-Algeria relations, connections, colonialism leading to anarchy, terrorism and war and what it is like for people to live in colonized countries, where interviews with friends, Cambodian, Algerian, Palestinian, German and Lebanese freedom fighters, members of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, members of Khmer Rouge, members of Revolutionary Cells, secret service agents, Stasi agents, revolutionary Islamists and Christians, journalists, jurists, collaborators, politicians, historians and philosophers talks about their experiences, political views and views on the person in question, depicts a majestic and mysterious study of character and contains a great and timely score by composer Jorge Arrigada. This somewhat humorous though thematically on the contrary, poignantly atmospheric and retrospectively historic documentary feature from the late 2000s which is set in the late 20th century and early 21st century in European, Middle eastern and Asian countries and where the life of a profound jurist and character with character who surpasses many great acting performances in cinema history, who defended terrorists, dictators and war criminals, who worked in mysterious ways and who in the 1970s after having gotten married with a client and converted to Islam went incognito for eight years, is placed into an historical context which commendably emphasizes the irrevocable consequences of terrorism and how closely associated state officials are with militant groups, is impelled and reinforced by its fragmented narrative structure, rhythmic continuity, cinematic use of archival footage, news articles and photographs, interviews which ranges from Tunisian journalist Lionel Duroy, German former exile Hans-Joachim Klein to German photographer Magdalena Kopp and comment by Mansour : "But after having considered the case,- maybe they heard voices like Jeanne d'Arc did, they chose me." An investigative biographical mystery.
manuel-pestalozzi
After having seen Schroeder's Idi Amin and Kiki the talking gorilla, I was disappointed by L'avocat. From an artistic point of view it is not on the same level. I found it difficult to recognize the organizing, guiding hand of the director. Also, the subject is strangely out of focus – but that is maybe just one of the points the movie wants to make. Maître Vergès must be a pretty elusive fellow and certainly not someone who let himself manipulate by a movie maker. And - contrary to Amin and the gorilla - Vergès is just not very telegenic. That's certainly nobody's fault, it's just a fact.What remains for me are the many „bonmots" this movie contains. It did not become clear to me if Vergès ever was a good lawyer. I suspect he always saw the court of law principally as a stage for making political statements or for furthering a certain self image. But he certainly is a great story teller. „My only war wound", he tells the interviewer, „was self inflicted – I cut a finger when I closed my pocket knife after eating a dish of oysters". „Mao listened to me attentively – or maybe he just wanted to be polite." It is fun to listen to him telling these anecdotes and being disrespectful, even to himself. Many, maybe too many other people make their entrance as interviewees. Even for someone who has a notion of the last few decades of world history it is not always easy to follow.Saying all this, I have to credit the movie for forming a pattern of statements, places and time periods that recount events which brought a lot of pain and sorrow to this planet. The central question - is Maître Vergès a man with a cause? - remains unanswered. Somehow he shifted from one „liberation movement" to the next, maybe connected to secret services, maybe not - his aims apparently as fuzzy as those of the said movements - never drowning like others but always ending up seemingly comfortably on the surface. It is never clear how much Vergès was a prime mover on the terrorist scene or a teleguided pawn. After seeing this movie I would liken him to a joker in a pack of cards.Someone not very deep into history might be surprised at how L'avocat shows that there were always connections and sympathies between old, active Nazis and young, seemingly leftist revolutionaries. Others know the old French saying: Les extrèmes se touchent.
Marty
This really hadn't any beginning, middle or end. It simply was a long conversation with various persons and Jaques Verges, the advocate of terror.The idea is an intriguing one, that of a lawyer who defends the reprehensible because he believes in due-process and the law more than abstract ideas like morality and goodness.But this isn't what it was, because Verges never believed his clients lacking in morality or goodness. He represented these clients because politically he felt he had to.It'd been more interesting (I think) to understand the psyche of a lawyer who represents clients he himself (or she herself) detests and holds no political allegiance to.The runtime is a bloated two-hours and seventeen minutes, and in that time holds very little focus. It's very interesting subject-matter, but it's presented in such a wandering manner that leaves us bored. Only two or three trials are explicitly discussed and played out for the viewers. The rest of this film is Verges political tendencies and how they have got him in hot water with the French government.
