Word: costa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Costa-Gavras's sense of irony is sharp. A scene between two French officers and a German lieutenant has the French justifying the "Special Section" because "directives from the central government must be obeyed by the judiciary if the state is to remain strong. When evil is bold, good must be stronger," they argue. In a surprising position of devil's advocate, the German points out that this section violates traditional French legal thought based on Montesquieu's idea of separation of powers. The Nazi, in other words, argues the French side and the Frenchman sounds like a Nazi. This...
...Costa-Gavras is a skillful enough filmmaker that what he does present is well put together. The narrative begins in Paris with the assassination of a Nazi admiral by a group of communist members of the resistance. The action then switches to Vichy where the new Minister of the Interior--a Nazi sympathizer--tries to force through a tough plan of retribution for the admiral's death. "In order to set an example," six political prisoners will be executed under a "Special Section" of the new The "Special Section" gives the Ministry the power to use the new law retroactively...
Without any new additions to the plot, the pace of the movie slows down to a lugubrious, ponderous crawl. Here, Costa-Gavras has unwisely strayed from his style. His specialty is the fast-paced, linear form, where events are linked together in some exciting sequence and the movie moves forward by inertia. In Z, first the lingering fate of the seriously injured central figure, then the unexpected slant taken by the prosecutor kept the excitement up. Here, the tension dies long before the prisoners do. And the irony, predictably, becomes heavy-handed. The Latin motto "Justitia", inscribed in mosaic...
...brief and superficial to seem anything but awkward. Glimpses of the judges' private lives serve only to show how little we know about them. So not only does the narrative sag badly, but the characters never rise above the level of faces in an important crowd. If Costa-Gavras could have involved the audience intimately by showing what happens in the judges' minds to cause their attitudes of collaboration--the events of injustice would have taken on a more human quality. A scanty plot would then have human underpinnings to compensate for its lack of suspense...
...stands, the implications of the film live and die in 1941. Its political overtones never acquire palpable contemporary significance--which one senses is what Costa-Gavras was after but missed. The vitality and importance of a film like Z is lacking in Special Section. What happened in Vichy seems like a stale story; but what happened in Greece during the dictatorship was genuinely tragic. There's nothing really wrong with making more than one film about political repression, but in a world where political repression easily wins prizes for the most popular form of government, a director like Costa-Gavras...