There are some jobs you just wouldn’t apply for – defence counsel for a renowned terrorist is one of them. But French lawyer Jacques Vergès has no such qualms. Over the years he’s built up a colourful roster of clients spanning anarchists and provocateurs, from Nazi Klaus Barbie (aka the ‘Butcher of Lyon’) to the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Through Vergès, Barbet Schroeder’s documentary examines the last half-century of terrorism. It’s a fascinating, often creepy tale that the director approaches with the dramatic impetus of fiction. Interviews and archival images are spliced with footage of Vergès sitting behind his desk – regal and erudite – toking on a Cuban like a Bond villain. Schroeder even tosses in an orchestral score at moments of heightened tension.
The film profiles an ideological man of Vietnamese and Réunionais heritage, burning with a sense of injustice and strong anti-colonial sentiment – “born angry” according to French journalist Lionel Duroy. He travels to Algeria to defend FLN (National Liberation Front) members, falling in love and later marrying Djamila Bouhired, on trial for planting bombs in cafés. Her death sentence is overturned thanks to Vergès’ ‘rupture’ defence, which refused to accept the legitimacy of the proceedings, and painted her as an emblem of freedom from oppression. It’s this figure of Vergès the nonconformist that prevails: always spoiling for a fight, empathising with the otherness of those he represents.
After Algeria, the waters turn a lot murkier, with links to Carlos the Jackal, French Nazi François Genoud and an eight year period in the ’70s when he ‘disappeared’. Yet despite the opening credits’ assertion that the film is the director’s point of view, Schroeder doesn’t dictate what you should think. There’s no commentary for starters and, hell, you’ve probably already decided he’s a monster. And as an emotionally detached Vergès refutes the death toll in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, one could be forgiven for thinking initial instincts have been vindicated.
Yet attempts to pigeonhole repeatedly fail. Vergès at first seems emotionless, only to weep in an Algerian jail. We think he’s an ogre and then he talks about using his defence of Klaus Barbie to compare French torture tactics in Algeria with the Gestapo – and perhaps he has a point. Terror’s Advocate is a film which demonstrates that the boundaries between right and wrong, freedom fighter and terrorist aren’t as concrete as we may have believed.
But what’s equally intriguing is the link between different ‘terror’ groupings exposed by the film. And for this Schroeder has assembled an epic cast of journalists, friends, former lovers, ex-terrorists and politicians talking on camera. Left-wing and right-wing don’t exist – fascists and Marxist revolutionaries happily get into bed.
It’s a fascinating story but be warned: you may need a spider diagram to keep up with it all. Who knows, it may even tempt you to renew that lapsed subscription to Conspiracy Theorists Monthly.
