Word: montand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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State of Siege. A film of major significance: Costa-Gavras (Z, The Confession) powerfully indicts covert American action to support Latin American dictatorships. Yves Montand plays a character who represents Daniel Mitrione -- the AID officer killed by Tupamaro insurgents in 1970 -- but emphasized his kidnapping less than his previous activities: training the Uruguayan police, teaching torture, repression, use of explosives. The film is committed, not biased -- and based to a surprisingly large degree on public information. 1973. (At the Charles Cinema, Boston...
Part of the film's importance is due to the people who made it. Costa-Gavras (Z and The Confession) directed. Yves Montand, star of Costa's last three films, stars here as well, but this time with a twist. Instead of portraying a positive character, Montand here has the role of the chief negative character. And possibly most important, Franco Solinas wrote the script. I say possibly the most important because Solinas also scripted Salvatore Guiliano and Battle of Algiers, two of the most politically sophisticated films extant...
...political killing must first eliminate any suspense about the final outcome. If it does not, the audience will focus too much on the question will he be killed, rather than on the questions why he was killed. Thus within the first few minutes, the audience discovers Philip Micheal Santore (Montand) dead in the back seat of an old Cadillac. The outcome is never in doubt and audience attention can then be turned to the reasons for his death...
...story is set in a fictional South American country called Montevideo, but it is based on a real incident in Uruguay, the kidnaping and killing of a U.S. AID official fictionally named Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand). Santore is kidnaped by a group of radical leftists and accused, along with the U.S. Government, of actively supporting the repressive regime by furnishing materiel and by taking police officials Stateside and training them in the techniques of political manipulation and torture. Santore is not tortured, only politely questioned and held for ransom: the freeing of all Montevidean political prisoners. The government, operating...
...kidnaping and murder are ever political imperatives−and State of Siege says they are the direct, perhaps inevitable results of oppression−then this man Santore, excellently portrayed by Montand as smug, calculating, amoral and dangerous, deserves his fate. The movie ends a little too tidily, with a new AID official being greeted at the airport and the sense of a tide nearly too strong to stem. But in the expression of someone in the crowd−probably a member of the radical group−watching the AID man disembark, we are also shown continued defiance. And rage...