Word: nadas
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Marnie (Hitch's klepto) tonight at 8. Nada (Chabrol) Sunday...
...being killed. To him, murder is the ultimate emotional excess, an enigma he has worried with a tough-minded, ironic and often subtle compassion in such recent films as This Man Must Die and Le Boucher. These movies are about the exorcizing of private demons. Never until The Nada Gang has Chabrol concerned himself with murder in its most absurd manifestation-as an act of public political protest...
...making a statement about a vast political or social issue? What is more cruel than making an individual, against his will, into a symbol of injustices for which he bears little, if any, personal responsibility and which may even be largely the figments of his assassins' imaginations? The Nada Gang, in short, had the potential for being Chabrol's great summing up. It is instead a botch...
...government. Eventually he and his captors all die in a police action that looks like a rescue operation but is planned from the start by its leader (Michel Aumont) as a massacre. Throughout, Chabrol scores the kind of points one expects from him. Most of the Nada gang are working out their personal problems through political activity. The same may be said of their official pursuers up to the highest level of the French government, whose ministers and bureaucrats are as blandly indifferent to humane concerns as the anarchists. There are some good performances by Fabio Testi as the most...
...sympathetically particularizing them a little more than he does the representatives of the state. But he does not go far enough in this direction to make any real difference. All he really accomplishes is the corruption of the point that he started out to make. As a result, The Nada Gang turns out to be just another picturesque cinematic bloodbath...