Costa-Gavras makes a detour from his crusade against right-wing dictatorships to shoot a movie about the Soviet regime. And, in spite of the director's obvious leftist leanings, his critique of the communist totalitarian regimes is no less merciless in its brutal honesty.
Yves Montand plays Anton Ludvik, the Czechoslovakian vice-minister of Foreign Affairs. He's a Party veteran, he fought with the Resistance against the Nazis in WWII, he has a comfortable house, he's a loyal and dedicated Party member.
That's why he can't understand why the Party has him being followed and later arrested to confess crimes he didn't commit. This is the world of the Soviet Union, where up is down, friends quickly become foes, logic gives in to submission and reality is fabricated by the Party officers. If they wish a loyal member to be guilty, he'll be guilty. It doesn't matter if he understands the charges; confession, submission is everything.
Costa-Gavras has made great fast-paced thrillers like Z and State of Siege. But The Confession is more like Special Section: it's a drama built around a brutal premise that is taken to its logical conclusions. The movie shows how the state, through torture, intimidation and appeals to loyalty can strip away a man of his sanity, dignity and defiance. Ludvik is slowly battered with endless interrogations and random torture to break his spirit, confuse him and get him to admit to whatever the Party wants. For their realism, the torture scenes are unparalleled, save perhaps by the ones in State of Siege. They're not the gore feasts fantasies of Eli Roth's movies, they're terrifying techniques probably still being used everywhere in the world wherever totalitarianism rules. It's their plausibility that makes them the more disturbing.
The movie also has a very Kafkaesque atmosphere, in particular The Trial. Kafka was a man ahead of his time when he prophesied a tyrannizing, incomprehensible world in which Man is crushed by the wheels of a faceless bureaucracy. This movie depicts that world very well, as torturers and interrogators change but the Party's presence remains, inspiring both dread and loyalty, for no true member can imagine living outside the Party.
This is another interesting aspects the movie explores, the dependence people have on the Party, their blind loyalty to it, and their belief in its infallibility. One of the characters' sentences describes this relation clearly: better be wrong and inside the Party, than right and out of it. It's their oxygen, their life, which only makes the accusations harder for Ludvik to understand.
The movie is not as visually impressive as Z or State of Siege, but the filmmakers do some interesting things with the editing, going back and forth, flash-forwarding, breaking the narrative to show Ludvik's state of mind through dreams, crossing the movie with real footage of Stalin and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It doesn't surprise me that Oscar-winning Françoise Bonnot worked on the editing.
The script is initially confusing, and the first ten minutes have so many characters moving in and out of the frame that it was hard to keep track of everyone. But once Ludvik is arrested, the movie becomes a lot more interesting. Jorge Semprún was Costa-Gavras greatest screenwriter and his understanding of the horrors of totalitarian regimes is unique in film history.
Very much in line with the rest of the work Costa-Gavras was doing in the '60s and '70s, this is a powerful movie that shouldn't remain forgotten.
Yves Montand plays Anton Ludvik, the Czechoslovakian vice-minister of Foreign Affairs. He's a Party veteran, he fought with the Resistance against the Nazis in WWII, he has a comfortable house, he's a loyal and dedicated Party member.
That's why he can't understand why the Party has him being followed and later arrested to confess crimes he didn't commit. This is the world of the Soviet Union, where up is down, friends quickly become foes, logic gives in to submission and reality is fabricated by the Party officers. If they wish a loyal member to be guilty, he'll be guilty. It doesn't matter if he understands the charges; confession, submission is everything.
Costa-Gavras has made great fast-paced thrillers like Z and State of Siege. But The Confession is more like Special Section: it's a drama built around a brutal premise that is taken to its logical conclusions. The movie shows how the state, through torture, intimidation and appeals to loyalty can strip away a man of his sanity, dignity and defiance. Ludvik is slowly battered with endless interrogations and random torture to break his spirit, confuse him and get him to admit to whatever the Party wants. For their realism, the torture scenes are unparalleled, save perhaps by the ones in State of Siege. They're not the gore feasts fantasies of Eli Roth's movies, they're terrifying techniques probably still being used everywhere in the world wherever totalitarianism rules. It's their plausibility that makes them the more disturbing.
The movie also has a very Kafkaesque atmosphere, in particular The Trial. Kafka was a man ahead of his time when he prophesied a tyrannizing, incomprehensible world in which Man is crushed by the wheels of a faceless bureaucracy. This movie depicts that world very well, as torturers and interrogators change but the Party's presence remains, inspiring both dread and loyalty, for no true member can imagine living outside the Party.
This is another interesting aspects the movie explores, the dependence people have on the Party, their blind loyalty to it, and their belief in its infallibility. One of the characters' sentences describes this relation clearly: better be wrong and inside the Party, than right and out of it. It's their oxygen, their life, which only makes the accusations harder for Ludvik to understand.
The movie is not as visually impressive as Z or State of Siege, but the filmmakers do some interesting things with the editing, going back and forth, flash-forwarding, breaking the narrative to show Ludvik's state of mind through dreams, crossing the movie with real footage of Stalin and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It doesn't surprise me that Oscar-winning Françoise Bonnot worked on the editing.
The script is initially confusing, and the first ten minutes have so many characters moving in and out of the frame that it was hard to keep track of everyone. But once Ludvik is arrested, the movie becomes a lot more interesting. Jorge Semprún was Costa-Gavras greatest screenwriter and his understanding of the horrors of totalitarian regimes is unique in film history.
Very much in line with the rest of the work Costa-Gavras was doing in the '60s and '70s, this is a powerful movie that shouldn't remain forgotten.