Blind Injustice

By JAY COCKS

Directed by COSTA-GAVRAS

Screenplay by JORGE SEMPRUN and COSTA-GAVRAS

Everything in Special Section is based on recent history. The events bear both the sting and the awkward com edy of truth. But unlike Z, a previous Semprun -- Costa-Gavras collaboration based on the 1963 assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, a Greek politician, Special Section lacks the narrative drive that can make a good melodrama with political meaning. Instead, the film is a puppet show of moral indignation.

In 1941, a German military cadet is shot dead in a Paris Metro station. It is a planned act of terrorism carried out by a band of young Marxists. The Germans notify the Vichy government that reprisals are called for. Anxious to please, the government, working through the Justice Department, sets up a kangaroo court which is known by the grimly evasive title "special section." The ministers of justice even supply their own reason for complying with the German edict -- who knows how many Frenchmen will die at German hands otherwise?

So, instead, Frenchmen die at the hands of their countrymen. The judges appointed to the special section are ambitious, amoral and untroubled by legal niceties. Dissidents are rounded up and tried according to a new law that makes it simple to expunge alleged enemies of the state. That law is also retroactive. A man who received a light sentence for pasting up a radical poster just weeks before finds himself in the dock again, this time condemned to death.

Unfortunately, the accusers and the accused in Special Section are brothers under the skin: every one of them, regardless of political persuasion, is a resounding stereotype. There are no real characters, only cameos enacted by a large cast of mostly unfamiliar actors. The judges are straw men in scarlet robes, passing out death sentences like souvenir fountain pens. Their victims are a rag-tag gallery of the common man meant to embody some evergreen liberal shibboleths: the fiery left-wing journalist; the good-humored, faintly ironic petty crook; the humble shopkeeper.

Such special sections did exist in France during the war; it is also true, as a postscript informs us, that not all of those who presided over them have been brought to account. But Costa-Gavras and Semprun only make the outrageous seem petty, and tragedy a thing of no greater human consequences than an other bad movie.

Jay Cocks

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