Carlos

Carlos was the world’s best known terrorist during the 1970s, a free-wheeling gun for hire who, although riding on the coat-tails of anti-capitalist politics, was driven largely by a sociopathic ego and love of the fast life. That is, at least, according to Olivier Assayas’s biopic.

Originally shown as a three part television series on French television with a running time of 5 ½ hours, chopped down to 159 minutes it is still a long film. This is particularly so in its latter stages set during the 1990s when Carlos, by this time an embarrassment to modern Arab nation states, apparently spent most of his time ignominiously scurrying from one former Middle Eastern benefactor to the next before being sold out to the French government by his fed-up hosts.

For the bulk of its running time, Carlos plays very much like Mesrine: Public Enemy No1, Jean-François Richet’s 2008 film about a notorious French criminal  - it is  part gangster movie, part character study. As such both, films share generic qualities. As Sánchez’s name suggests, he came from a committed Communist background but politics and ideology are not on the agenda here.  Both protagonists are classic “outsider” figures driven by profound anti-social impulses to criminal behaviour. Assayas’s Carlos is ruthless and mercenary, cunning and charismatic, much like Richet’s Jacques Mesrine. And both had a way with women. No doubt there is a good deal of truth in this but ultimately both films are “entertainments” although Assayas does mix archival footage with dramatizations to create a portrait of what largely unfolded on the television screens of the time.

 

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