The Story of Z

Throughout the West, millions of people have formed their opinion of the military regime in Greece by viewing the French-Algerian film Z, the title of which is the Greek symbol for "he still lives." A powerfully contrived and brilliantly acted thriller (TIME, Dec. 5), Z purports to give a picture of contemporary Greece by focusing on a right-wing conspiracy to kill a leftist politician. At the bottom of this plot are revealed all the elements that are bound to rouse the liberal Western conscience: self-righteous military men, violence-loving fascists and broad hints of American complicity.

To what extent is Z an accurate portrayal of affairs in Greece? According to its director, Greek Exile Constantin Costa-Gavras, it is based throughout on "real facts." Up to a point, he is right. The movie faithfully re-creates an incident in 1963 when a leading left-wing deputy, Grigorios Lambrakis, was struck and killed by a pickup truck after addressing a rally in Salonica. As in the film, the death was first labeled an accident, but a tenacious prosecutor gathered enough evidence to show two right-wing thugs had been hired by police to commit the deed. At the subsequent trial, the murderers received light jail sentences. The six indicted police were acquitted though they were dismissed from the force.

Compressed History. Where Z departs from the facts is in its implication that the present junta led by Colonel George Papadopoulos was involved in the right-wing plot. By a convenient compression of history, Z strongly suggests that the junta engineered the assassination, then used the ensuing disorders as a pretext to seize power. The assassination actually occurred four years before the colonels came to power, and there is no known evidence linking them with it. The episode, in fact, had quite different results. It helped topple the conservative regime of Constantine Karamanlis, which was then replaced by the left-centrist regime of George Papandreou, who was an enemy of the hard-line Greek military. As the reviewer for Manhattan's Village Voice put it, Z's plot is "much as if an American film maker had attempted to establish a direct link between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the accession of Spiro Agnew."

Director Costa-Gavras, moreover, takes sides unashamedly. The film fails completely to make the valid historical point that the Greek left should bear a share of the guilt for the public violence and the breakdown of democratic politics in Greece.

The Greek conservatives are portrayed as unredeemable goons with a tendency toward sadism and homosexuality. "What is false is the lack of differentiation," complains Helen Vlachos, a former Athens publisher who was placed under house arrest by the junta and later fled the country. "They are all ridiculous in the same way, all brutal in the same way."

In Z, the rightists kill off all the witnesses to the murder. In reality, none was killed (though one was badly beaten), and all showed up at the trial. By assorted hints, the leftists indicate that the U.S. is backing the military in order to protect its bases in Greece. As one anti-American remarks: "Always blame the U.S. Even when you're wrong, you're right."

But if Z distorts some of the facts of contemporary Greece to suit its own purposes, it succeeds in conveying much of the stifling atmosphere of that country today. The insular patriotism, simple-mindedness and dictatorial methods of the colonels are devastatingly captured, if in caricature. Their bumptious puritanism is neatly depicted in the film's opening sequence in which the military brass are assembled for indoctrination. A rightist general compares the disease afflicting the grapes of Greece with the sickness assaulting the body politic: party factionalism, overfree speech, alien ideas. The military, he announces, must serve as the antibodies to repel this dread invasion. What's good for plants, in other words, is good for people.

Bitter Postscript. Though the colonels were not participants in the murder, as Z suggests, they have nonetheless provided some intriguing postscripts to the trial that would be worthy of inclusion in the film. They reinstated and promoted the six police officers who had been sacked for their part in the murder and then retired them on pension.

The brave young prosecutor, whose real-life name is Christos Sartzetakis, had been elevated to a judgeship because of his work in the case. In 1968, the colonels dismissed him from the bench, along with 29 other judges, for "political bias and failure to uphold the prestige of the judiciary." When Lambrakis was killed in Salonica, another deputy, George Tsarouhas, was brutally beaten. In 1968, Tsarouhas was arrested by the junta for subversive activities. On the way to police headquarters in Salonica, he died. According to the official police report, he had suffered a "heart attack."

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