Word: gerarde
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...years; and the direction of the narrative changes completely. Marie is no longer the poor (but honest) farm girl, virgin down to the calluses on her bare feet. Now, openly contemptuous of her father's self-inflicted integrity, she has taken to sneaking off to the woodshed with Gerard, leader of an adolescent gang that rides around on motorbikes...
...crucial problem is that the theme, though powerful, is dreadfully familiar. Based on the autobiographical account of Artur London, former Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Czechoslovakia, Confession follows, moment by agonized moment, the arrest, interrogation, trial and conviction of an old-line Communist. Gerard (Yves Montand) is a Czech Jew who fought with the International Brigade in Spain, served in the French underground and was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp before returning to his homeland after World War II. Traces of Z are immediately apparent. On a gray January day in 1951, Gerard...
...process of breaking a strong man by inquisition begins. At first, Gerard is obdurate, refusing to confess to trumped-up charges of treason, or even believe that the party to which he has consecrated his life is behind his bewildering plight...
...problem is that Gerard is only as lifelike as Montand makes him; his wife (played by Simone Signoret, Montand's real-life wife) is relegated to the unhappy role of two-dimensional superfluity. Indeed, Costa-Gavras' style is to present characters as metaphors for life forces, rather than as people. That was fine for Z, which was sustained by the suspense of its whodunit framework. Confession fails as a film because it is at base a stenographic document, meticulously recounting the liturgy of political confession without regard for its drama...
...hidden in an ordinary apartment just ten miles from downtown Montreal for two solid months suggested that the Canadian police were rather sorry sleuths. They also did badly in one of thousands of raids carried out under the 1914 wartime-security act. Police searching for an F.L.Q. suspect named Gerard Pelletier stormed into the rambling Montreal residence of Canadian Secretary of State Gerard Pelletier...