A nightmare revisited
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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A quarter century after the Munich Olympics killings, Spielberg raises serious questions through a tense thriller.
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CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC: Steven Spielberg retells the bloody events of the 1972 Olympics from Munich.
While fact often fuels the fiction of cinema, canny filmmakers over the years have developed a gut instinct, which tells them which historical happening could do with a `filmi' retread — and which is best avoided.
The high drama of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, when members of the Palestinian `Black September' group kidnapped — then killed — 11 Israeli athletes after a rescue attempt that went fatally wrong, would seem tailor-made for overblown big screen treatment.
But its aftermath — the vengeful reprisals launched by the outraged Jewish state and the upward spiral of counter reprisals by Arab groups — made this a controversial topic, triggering too many disparate emotions, for mainstream film companies to even consider it.
So, with the exception of a documentary-style treatment by HBO, `Munich' remained `out-of bounds' as the stuff of popular cinema till Steven Spielberg stepped in.
The man who directed `Schindler's List,' the moving cinematic document about the holocaust in Nazi Germany, has no need to prove his credentials as a Jewish filmmaker. The only doubt that might have remained was whether this might cloud his artistic judgment when it came to portraying the Palestinians.
Fair and objective
His `Munich,' which comes to South India this month, lays to rest all such doubts. It is objective and fair-minded and dares to question whether a policy of swift and bloody reprisal and counter reprisal might be the best way to tackle terrorists.
In taking such a stand and seeking to understand Israel's `war on terror' policy, Spielberg has touched some very raw nerves on both sides. The Jewish Magazine dismisses this as "a bad movie" that does "damage to Israel in the long run."
The Arab View website dismisses the film as "at best a cerebral thriller— decidedly a pro-Israeli and Palestinian one." As Roger Ebert, doyen of American film critics writes: "By not taking sides, he (Spielberg) has taken both sides."
It is the director's personal pact with the events of Munich 1972: a pact to tell it like it needs to be told.
Opening with a pulse-pounding enactment of the kidnapping of the Israeli athletes from their Olympic stadium dormitory, the film moves to a meeting chaired by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, where she sanctions the assassination of 11 Palestinians suspected of planning the Munich attack.
"Every civilisation finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," she says, to silence any moral qualms in her cabinet. She handpicks Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), an officer of the Israeli secret service agency, Mossad, and gives him a team of four other undercover agents to carry out the hits. Their very first target is a scholarly poet and writer; and though the film does not say so explicitly, there is a suggestion that the victim might have been innocent.
In another case, Spielberg throws in an almost Hitchcockian suspense, when the team cancels a hit in the nick of time after the target's young daughter approaches the booby-trapped phone. As the killings in Geneva, Paris, Beirut continue, getting more graphic every time, the Palestinians launch worldwide reprisals which take dozens of innocent lives.
A shadowy contact Louis (Mathieu Amalric) and his father (Michael Lonsdale) point out the targets to the hit team in exchange for money.
There is also the hint that they betray the team to their enemies — the director's hint at the amorality of the counter-terrorism business. About half way through their hit list, the Israelis, particularly the bomb expert Robert (Mathieu Cassovitz), lapse into self-doubt about the morality of their act.
After nine of the 11 Palestinians are dispatched, Avner is unceremoniously dumped by the wily go-between Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush). He goes back to his wife and baby, whom he has moved out of Israel to New York. As the film ends and the two men go their separate ways, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre are silhouetted against the skyline of New York.
It is surely Spielberg's ultimate statement that the roots of violence like the September 11 terrorist attack, lie in the legacy of hatred that began with the Munich massacre and Israel's bloody answer to it. And the Palestinians' even more bloody reply might well be the coda of this deeply felt, cinematic statement on the ethics of counter terrorism, cloaked in the garb of a violent thriller.
Could anybody other than Spielberg have pulled it off?
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Of political thriller
`Munich' is the latest in a long line of political thrillers, which use the garb of a suspense story to highlight a political reality. Though it did not convert any of them into Oscars, `Munich' received five Academy Award nominations earlier this year. More successful was the other politically-oriented film, `Syriana.'
In recent years, the novels of Tom Clancy have provided grist to Hollywood's political thriller mill.
One of the Oscar contenders last year was `Hotel Rwanda,' a moving film about a Schindler-like character, a hotel manager played by Don Cheadle, trying to save members of the Tutsi tribe from massacre by the rival Hutus during the 1994 civil unrest in Rwanda. Not a thriller per se, it still had its heart-pounding moments.
For many film-goers in their 40s and 50s, the archetype political thriller of their younger days must be `The Day of the Jackal,' Frederick Forsyth's documentary-style-novel about the attempt to assassinate French President De Gaulle, by the shadowy Carlos `The Jackal.'
But if there is one cinematic master of the political thriller, that is surely the French filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras whose 1968 film `Z,' based on the assassination of a popular politician (Yves Montand) during the military rule of Greece in the early 1960s is still considered the showpiece of the political thriller genre.
Costa-Gavras, continued to deliver sharp political messages in thriller garb, right up to 1981 when he made `Missing.'
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