Spurious Suspense

By J.C.

STATE OF SIEGE Directed by COSTA-GAVRAS Screenplay by FRANCO SOLINAS and COSTA-GAVRAS

Great squalls of controversy have been buffeting this essentially unsurprising political thriller ever since it was removed from the inaugural showing at Washington's Kennedy Center (TIME, April 16). The American Film Institute, an organization of high-flown title and dubious distinction, was dedicating a theater for itself, but A.F.I. Director George Stevens Jr. thought State of Siege inappropriate for such an august occasion. He chose to believe that the film rationalizes political assassination.

It ought, therefore, to be pointed out that State of Siege is only secondarily about assassination. It is primarily a passionate and persuasive indictment of U.S. meddling in South America, a subject that official Washington would like to see dramatized about as much as it would enjoy a musical comedy about Watergate. The A.F.I., of course, is an organization funded by the Government, and Stevens holds down a political job. So the movie was yanked, and the distributors had a cause celebre, along with a lot of publicity of incalculable value.

State of Siege, like Costa-Gavras' other work (Z, The Confession), is angry all right, and with cause, but it is also unnecessarily emphatic, too easy and simplistic, and stylistically jazzy past the point of stridency. His movies are like glossy international versions of Dragnet, with a rather different political bias. Like the dauntless Jack Webb, Costa-Gavras employs a sort of arhythmic, staccato editing and prominent, even aggressive music (by Mikis Theodorakis) to punch the movie along, giving it a kind of spurious suspense. His characters are mouthpieces, not people, repositories of conflicting political attitudes. In State of Siege they lack only conventioneers' name tags to clearly identify them.

The 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 through a paralegal police death squad, rounds up some of the revolutionaries; the others, now badly crippled, vote on Santore's fate. The verdict is to make good on their original threat: execution.

If 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. And strength.

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