Word: montand
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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...
...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...
...plot proves a convenient vehicle for an assault on the impressionable eye and idle imagination. Cesar (Yves Montand) is a self-made tycoon, a blustery tough guy with a big heart full of histrionic whimsy, whose larger than life personality subsumes John Wayne and Buster Keaton under a single brow. Romy Schneider, rescued from the anonymity of a screen beauty turned tiresome, plays Cesar's lover Rosalie. She spends a good deal of her time casting long, soft, knowing looks at everyone, liberally displaying her carefully assembled sumptuousness...
...Montand's performance, though outstanding in its breadth of characterization, further attenuates the substance of the film, for Cesar quickly develops into a doubly self-conscious showman, playing to the camera as well as the cast, with rolls of the eye and slapstick grimaces coming to dominate his personality. And the chemistry between these characters is such that when one shows off the others follow suit. Montand ultimately becomes hemmed in by his own loveable ostentation; his suicide attempt, conducted in all, seriousness, brought forth chuckles from an audience doggedly looking for a punchline...