Dialectic Inferno

By Mark Goodman

The Confession is the latest effort of the brilliant Greek director Costa-Gavras, who made Z. The new film is savage, methodical and painstakingly realistic; it is also static, relentless and thoroughly dispiriting. It closely documents the horror of a staged Stalinist purge trial, yet lacks the creative energy to convey the vibrancy of terror.

A crucial problem is that the theme, though powerful, is dreadfully familiar. Based on the autobiographical account of Artur London, former Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Czechoslovakia, Confession follows, moment by agonized moment, the arrest, interrogation, trial and conviction of an old-line Communist. Gerard (Yves Montand) is a Czech Jew who fought with the International Brigade in Spain, served in the French underground and was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp before returning to his homeland after World War II. Traces of Z are immediately apparent. On a gray January day in 1951, Gerard is cut off in a Prague street by two carloads of secret police who rough him up, blindfold him and whisk him off to prison without a word.

So the process of breaking a strong man by inquisition begins. At first, Gerard is obdurate, refusing to confess to trumped-up charges of treason, or even believe that the party to which he has consecrated his life is behind his bewildering plight.

His devotion persists throughout the unremitting interrogation. "Better be wrong inside the party than right outside it" is the credo he clings to, recalling Rubashov in Darkness at Noon. But carefully, exhaustively, his interrogators ensnare him in a network of lies and half-truths. The process of psychic and physical torture erode his integrity, and eventually his inquisitors are able to persuade him to sign sentences and paragraphs that finally accumulate into a phony confession branding him a "Trotskyite" and a U.S. spy. It requires a seemingly endless 138 minutes for his interrogation and torture to resolve into the obligatory conclusion: mock trial, conviction and eventual release after the post-Stalin housecleaning.

Confession has enough individual merits to redeem its overall flaws. Though their film lacks the compact literacy of The Prisoner, Costa-Gavras and his Z squad (Screenwriter Jorge Semprun and Director of Photography Raoul Coutard) are too subtle and ingenious to make anything conspicuously bad. The brutal indifference of lower-echelon toughs is conveyed with deadly certainty. The pathetic buffoonery of a courtroom defendant losing his pants is an excruciatingly effective touch of humor. Nor is it possible to fault Montand's performance as a Camus figure cast into a dialectic inferno.

The problem is that Gerard is only as lifelike as Montand makes him; his wife (played by Simone Signoret, Montand's real-life wife) is relegated to the unhappy role of two-dimensional superfluity. Indeed, Costa-Gavras' style is to present characters as metaphors for life forces, rather than as people. That was fine for Z, which was sustained by the suspense of its whodunit framework. Confession fails as a film because it is at base a stenographic document, meticulously recounting the liturgy of political confession without regard for its drama.

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