Sterminate gruppo Zero

"Nada" was the most inadequate follow-up to "Les NOces Rouges" which,with hindsight,appears now as the last good movie of Chabrol's golden era (1967-1973) "Nada" is Chabrol's first real attempt at a wholly political movie;his previous work "les Noces Rouges" had also political elements but it was more a psychological thriller with the usual look at society in French provinces."Nada" includes terrorists,ambassador,hostage-taking,a lot of blood,not really Chabrol's field.A heterogeneous cast gives the movie the coup de grâce :only Duchaussoy,who had already played with the director ,and Maurice Garrel are up to scratch.Viviane Romance ,one of Duvivier's actresses ("la Belle Equipe" "Panique") ,is wasted as a madam (Gabrielle).Italian actors (Fabio Testi,Lou Castel)are awful.

With "Nada" this a second period of barren inspiration for Chabrol .It would be "Violette Nozières" before he was again at the top of his game.

A group of anarchist leftists called "Nada" and led by the terrorist Buenaventura Diaz (Fabio Testi) abducts the American ambassador Richard Poindexter (Lyle Joyce) in a brothel in Paris and brings him to a farm in the countryside. The French Minister (André Falcon) gives a blank cheque to the violent chief of police Goemond to destroy the kidnappers and then makes him the scapegoat to protect the State.

"Nada" is a political thriller by Claude Chabrol with a confused and pointless message. Maybe in the historical moment of its release (1974), with the United States of America sponsoring the dictatorships in South America, this acid criticism to the role and behavior of the State could work. But in 2011, this film is dated. In this genre, I still prefer Costa-Gravas films. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Exterminação Grupo Zero" ("Extermination Group Zero")

Note: On 13 December 2024, I saw this film again.

So far, very few reviewers seem to have grasped what is going on in this film and the rest are floundering. For it is highly local and highly topical, as Chabrol contrasts two poisons then prevalent in French society.

One, more recent, was the evil residue of the unrest in 1968. In France, as in West Germany and Italy, minuscule groups of ex-students mouthing empty slogans took to robbery, extortion and murder in the apparent hope of triggering the collapse of capitalism.

The other, longer lasting, was the even more toxic legacy of successive military defeats. After the defeat by Germany in 1940, the upper levels of the French civil service and police were permeated with men who collaborated in the horrors of the Vichy dictatorship and the Nazi occupation. After the defeat in Algeria in 1962, the army was also infected by the bloody repression of its opponents, real or supposed. Too many men had learned that you got results by ignoring the rules and by resorting to torture and murder.

Chabrol's terrorists are suitably dangerous but bumbling, with only their leader aspiring to some sort of Lucifer status. His cops are terrifying, replicas of the Gestapo that had terrorised France only 30 years earlier, with the diabolical commissaire sporting a hairstyle of the early 1940s while his two goons could easily have been pulling out toenails at that time.

Though placing the story in a highly contemporary setting, as always Chabrol is not making a political statement or giving us a history lesson. His subject is humanity and its flaws.

PS One reviewer warns us not to let our children see this film. Not because of the endemic violence and profanity but because of two brief moments when a woman is shown with no clothes and a man is shown on top of a woman under the bedclothes. Both are intrinsic to the story, as the first glimpse is of a prostitute at her place of work and the second is of a terrorist, who (highly symbolic!) has to admit to the girl that he is impotent. Though it is always admirable to broaden young people's minds, I can't think of a single Chabrol film which could really be appreciated before the age of 18.

An anarchist group called Nada kidnap the American ambassador in a high class Paris brothel. The state then counter this by giving the chief of police license to deal with the situation. The state proves to be more brutal than the terrorists.

This is a pretty atypical film from Claude Chabrol. While it deals with moral ambiguity, which many of his films do, it also is very directly political which is unusual. Other than the idea that the state can be more amoral than terrorists, I'm not too sure what else the film has to say. The subject matter of Marxist revolutionaries taking radical action is one that would have been much more in vogue in the 70's than now though. Overall, the film lacks the personal feel of Chabrol's more intimate thrillers. The political angle doesn't seem to be material best suited to his style. And as a result Nada is a slightly underwhelming movie.

For nearly a decade, in the late 60s and early 70s, Claude Chabrol was arguably the greatest director in the world, in Europe at any rate. 'Nada' comes from this period, and yet is an exception in the oeuvre. Instead of a claustrophobic thriller in a domestic setting, 'Nada' is about international terrorists running amok through France (in a way, the film is a parody of the previous year's 'Day of the Jackal'). Instead of intricate psychological depth, Chabrol offers pure cartoon. The police are a hangover from the Vichy era, murderously cyncial, while the terrorists are organised by someone who no longer believes in revolution.

As a sophisticated analysis of pressing contemporary events, the whole thing seems rather silly, until you start spotting Chabrol's wicked, misanthropic irony, and you wonder if the old boy hasn't done it after all. Never take Chabrol's glittering surfaces at face value. The massacre scene is deeply cynical, shocking, brilliant cinema.