Film Reviews

Terror's Advocate

• Rating:
• Director: Barbet Schroder.
• Starring: Jacques Verges.
• Details: France / 135mins (PG).

"I was asked would I defend Hitler? I said, I'd even defend Bush but only if he pleaded guilty." Controversial lawyer Jacques Vergés has defended some of the worst the world has thrown at us. He has defended, and later married, Djamila Bouhired, one of those responsible for the Milk Bar bombing in Algeria (depicted in The Battle For Algiers), Carlos the Jackal, various African dictators and despots and even Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon (although this is glossed over). A supporter of the FLN, Verges insists he knows the struggles freedom fighters under colonial rule endure; born to a father from the French island Reunion in the Pacific and a Vietnamese mother, Jacques has looked across the table at his clients and thinks: I’m you. He cares. He becomes obsessed, using everything in his power - like turning each trial into a media circus - to gain the best defence for his clients. And it’s usually works, to some extent. After that, Verges’s idealism took a back seat. He went underground from 1980 - 1978 and was rumoured to be living with the Khmer Rouge - although interviews with Pol Pot and Brother #2, Leng Sary, state otherwise. Today, sitting back in his plush office, pulling on a cigar, Verges is honest and open when Schroder’s camera is turned on him. A fascinating and insightful documentary, where it falls down is the length and the amount of information Schroder is asking the viewer to digest in one sitting - Terror’s Advocate would take a couple of viewings to really know what was going on. The director spends an age with the Algiers trial in 1965, setting up back stories so we get the full disclosure, but then zooms through the rest, assuming that the viewer is well read on the subjects. Names, dates, places - all are thrown at the screen in such a frantic fashion it’s hard to keep abreast of it all. At the end of day, we don’t really get to know the man behind the perpetual grin, only what he wants to know.

Review by Gavin Burke