Word: raoule
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...Confession was shuttled out of Boston without surplus discussion or playing-time: it entered the Harvey chain, but played the Orson Welles in a print dubbed with bad American gangsterese. Photographed by Raoul Coutard, written by Jorge Semprun, directed by Costa-Gavras (there's talent in those credits), this chronicle of the Czech Slansky trials resonates with modern fears of industrial slates, of resulting dehumanization, and the ascendance of politics over morals. But it's no sermon: the bulk of the film is anti-melodramatic, a complex historical document, and terror comes through to both mind and gut because...
...middle of Vietnam horrors. It's a slight piece of social history. But it is accurate, emotionally powerful, and if it didn't preach pacifism in a Have-Have Not war, it would come very close to non-partisanship. The film's power is in the eye of Raoul Coutard, who here debuts as writer-director. American soldiers freeze in grotesque command postures. A theater explodes and its audience flees, losing intestines en route. Slum kids piss on a child-exploiting businesswoman's car. The connecting tissue doesn't equal the fragments, but these fragments are hard-edged stuff...
Moments later, Actor Rip Torn, who has played a bodyguard called Raoul Key O'Houlihan, goes after Mailer (or Kingsley) with a hammer. "You're supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley," Torn yells. "You must die, not Mailer." The director stares at him in frightened disbelief. At that moment, Mailer later said, it was impossible for him to tell whether Torn was serious or only acting. Torn claimed he was acting, but audiences still cannot tell as they watch the episode. In this scene Mailer achieves his objective: the melding of screen illusion and reality...
...Raoul Coutard's Hoa Binh begins on the outside. Its first shot is a map of East Asia, and there is the Vietnam of our mind's eye, a twisted banana fastened to the Asian underside. The map gives way to images of American soldiers, transporting weapons, rescuing the wounded, and patrolling the jungle. Still, it is Vietnam from without, seen through Western eyes, in terms of bombing targets, helicopter landing zones, bars and whorehouses...
Over the past ten years, Raoul Coutard has achieved a reputation as one of the world's great cinematographers. In that time he has worked for almost all of the noted French "New Wave" film makers (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, among others). This is his first directorial effort, and it would seem that his technical background would incline him toward a stylistic self-consciousness. But Coutard is too sure of himself to feel a need to demonstrate his proficiencies. His direction is efficient rather than ostentatious. His concern is with narrative, and the narrative is rigourously simple...