SnoopyStyle Anton Ludvik aka Gerard (Yves Montand) is the vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia. He is worried that he's being followed. Other officials are being picked up in a purge. He gets picked up by a dark militaristic organization. His family is harassed. His wife Londonova (Simone Signoret) struggles in her new circumstances. He is psychologically tortured to give false confessions.This is basically two hours of movie confinement with his jailers doing all kinds of psychological warfare. At times, I feel like being tortured myself. There's good and bad in that. It doesn't make for a pleasant or necessarily a compelling viewing experience. It's more of a compelling academic exercise. This is the cinematic equivalent of stress position. The acting is impeccable and the production is first rate. It's Kafkaesque and a cry against totalitarianism.

Matthew Kresal "Confess? Confess to what?"That is the question asked by Yves Montand as Artur London at a point fairly early in Costa-Gavras' The Confession. Released in 1970 hot on the heels of Z, The Confession also tells a true story though this one is set behind the Iron Curtain and explores the Stalinist era show trials. How it does so is through the journey of one man into an increasingly bewildering situation that feels straight out of Kafka's The Trial. Except, as the film reminds us, this actually happened.Though the setting is different, it's hard not to find the film a spiritual successor to Z. Both films deal ultimately with the same theme: the misuse of government power and the subversion of justice. In the case of this film, it's not an assassination but a 1952 Czech show trial. Yet the film, through Jorge Semprún's script and Costa- Gavras direction, play the film not as a thriller but as a very different kind of journey into a world just as corrupt but perhaps even more horrifying. The journey the film takes us on is a fairly simple one. One may find themselves asking how, in cases around the world, why someone would confess to something they didn't do. Understanding just how and why a person would that can often be difficult to understand. Watching this film removes the doubt of that by often putting the viewer into the position of an accused man and his family going through just such as experience. Across two hours or so, we're shown how it can happen through a combination of torture, misplaced faith in the system, and appealing to that most basic of instincts: survival. We see how innocent events can be turned into damning statements, how promises are made but quickly forgotten, how the threat of a terrible fate can lead a man on a path from which there seems no escape. Watching the film, I often found myself thinking back to Kafka's The Trial as the accused tries to make sense of the events around him and how ultimately the only choice might be to accept his fate. It's a journey that the viewer isn't likely to forget soon after watching it.Part of that is down to the cast and the leading man in particular. Yves Montand made a huge impression as the charismatic assassinated politician in Z and the role he plays here couldn't be further removed from that role. Here Montand plays an unassuming government official whose only crimes seem to be having been in the wrong place at the wrong time and thus spends years of his life imprisoned and tortured. Montand's performance, most emotionally and physically is something to behold, as we see an intelligent man reduced to a shell of his former self and is ultimately made a victim of the very system he has been spent his life working to defend and support. That Montand manages to go from dignified man to complacent victim and back again is a testament to his skill as an actor in bringing the script to life.The supporting cast is solid. Simone Signoret as Montand's wife gives an intriguing and truthful performance as she too goes on a journey just as bewildering, trying to make sense of the chaos around her. Gabriele Ferzetti also gives a standout performance as one of the many interrogators as what seems a reasonable man with the best intentions of everyone at heart though (as his final scene suggests), his motives are never quite clear. The film overall is well cast and no one would seem to have been miscast in any part which itself is a testament to just how well cast it is.What really separates this film from Z (and perhaps the other films of Costa-Gavras) is its atmosphere. The score is sparse and lacks the upbeat quality found in both Z and State Of Siege, going instead for an underplayed feel that also gives the film a strong sense of reality through its lack of presence. There is a stark, gray feel to the film across many of its scenes with the exception of scenes set at a later date from the rest of the main narrative. The pace is also much different, with less energy going into the narrative drive which is something that helps to give the sense of time passing slowly for both accused and viewer alike. It's an interesting feeling and one that works well.Yet there's more to it than that as the film puts the viewer a little too close for comfort into the situation. Costa-Gavras makes some interesting use of cinematography and sound at times during sequences with Montand is blindfolded, playing those scenes in either close- ups or extreme close-ups with an exaggerated sound level to help the viewer understand what must be going on behind the blindfold by barely giving them anymore knowledge that the character has. That sense also extends to some hallucinatory atmosphere in some of the interrogation scenes where exhaustion catch up with the lead and cause the lines between reality and nightmare, past and present, to blur to the point of confusion. Rarely has a film captured the experiences of both imprisonment and the horrors of sleep deprivation as well as this film does.The Confession then, in the final analysis, is a film of many things. It's a Kafka-esque journey into a dark chapter of 20th century history, one that lets the viewer understand why imprisonment is like in a dystopian state. Yet it is the combination of filmmakers, actors, and script that convey the ultimate horror of the film: that real life can be even more terrible than anything a fiction writer can come up with. Though set in Easter Europe of the early 1950s, this tale of justice and political faith betrayed is a lesson that is timeless and in need of being remembered.

Rodrigo Amaro In "L'Aveau" Costa-Gavras breaks at once and for all in defending one political ideology and attacking the other, like he did in "Z". This time he goes to show that both sides have their problematic aspects, they all make severe mistakes, we can't know which was good and which was bad. The bottom of line is that both with capitalism and communism someone decent always had to pay the prize for trying to do the right thing.Yves Montand plays the victim once again (murdered in "Z" and arrested by militants in "Etat de Siege" closing the combative Gavras political trilogy, "Missing" goes as an addendum, made years later after those films), a Czech and Communist vice-minister who'll be arrested and suffer on the hands of other members of the party who consider him a traitor of their cause. They believe he was a spy who had connections with American officials and all they want is a full confession of his crimes, which never existed, never happened (and they know that!), using of mental and physical methods to achieve results with the prisoner. The confession extraction is the real purpose to be visualized in here, exploited in painful and realistic details, methods used by the Communist - I recalled some of the descriptions made by Soljenitsin in "Gulag Archipelag", released on the same year as "L'Aveau" - like privation of sleep, keep marching at all times inside of the cell, and many other horrible techniques they used on prisoners during months and years if possible in order to break their resistance and confess everything, real or not.We have to give plenty of credit to Montand during those scenes, which are not few. Definitely not an easy shooting to make, you feel his exhaustion, weakening each frame goes by, the visible weight-loss, he went to extremes very few actors can reach and no, this isn't much method acting, one does not go in training method for those scenes, he just put himself there at each sequence. It doesn't go well for the character and it sure does not go well with the audience. It's hard to watch since the brutality and the frequency everything happens is so repetitive as if Gavras was trying to make the people in the audience to break out from the movie when in fact he's just being real with the events, causing some stir in us to the point where we ask ourselves how come this guy is not guilty of treason. In this manifest against the totalitarianism, the writer and director seemed to not making of the Socialists the almost heroes they were in "Z", while investigating the assassination of the popular leader. Their destructive paranoia, the unsubstantial suspicion they had with their own members, it's all a smoke curtain to hide the flaws of bigger people working on the Party and to hide the failures of a deeply flawed and inconsistent regime. Authentic, honorable and well-acted in all possible ways, just not much easy to endure. But truthful, powerful, haunting and rewarding nonetheless. 9/10

steve-raybould I saw this film last night and it has being going around in my head all day. It builds with a slow intensity which becomes absolutely compulsive. In style it reminded me a lot of The Godfather films. Calm, matter of fact but intensively observed portrayals of almost unbelievably hideous events. It has the same effect - if you stop to watch for just a few seconds, you are irresistibly drawn into the stream of events. Yves Montand is at his down beat best. What struck me most is that this true story of the post-way purges in the USSR's East European client states is of a time and place almost inconceivable to most of us now. The blind belief in The Party, the Inquisition-like mind games of the interrogators that convince the accused that to demonstrate their true loyalty to the Party, they must confess to the most ridiculous accusations of their betrayal of it. And I was surprised to see that it was made in 1971, the feel is absolutely contemporary, even though it depicts such far off events. While I was watching, I was convinced that I knew the story - isn't this the same as Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon'?