O Advogado do Terror

Jacques Vergès has been the defense attorney for members of the Khmer Rouge, Algerian FLN, Palestinian PFLP, and other terrorists. It starts with him as a French foot soldier. As a young lawyer, he's contacted by the Algierian resistance and he became their sympathetic disruptive famous lawyer. Using footage from "The Battle of Algiers", it tries to explain the struggle. It's mostly his friends, clients and supporters in this movie.

The movie starts with him defending Khmer Rouge leaders and that's really annoying. This is very much an one-sided monologue. It's somewhat interesting to follow his life and career but he's a fanatic. He's not some ACLU lawyer looking to ensure rights of the condemned. This guy has no objectivity or sympathy other than for his clients. It feels like the movie is preaching to the choir. There is also an arrogance to the man that is off-putting. I don't know why he won't reveal where he was for those years. He's there smoking his cigar and I'm sure the documentarians must have asked. It's part of his superiority complex. It's not until the Nazi connections that the movie gets interesting but that takes over an hour to get there. However the movie fails to connect all the dots. This documentary fails to answer some very basic questions about who this guy is and where he comes from. The investigation is incomplete.

Then there is the style of the documentary. It is non-stop talking heads make it rather boring. It's like trying to cobble together a narrative with each witness giving one or two sentences. Most docs use a narrator to direct and drive the discussion. This one needs something more than talking heads talking. This feels like a rambling run-on sentence.

the film begins with a credit, as stated in other reviews, that it represents the point of view of the director. the material is ambiguous but it seems to me pretty clear that Schroder respects Verges. I disagree strongly with the person who imagines it'd be more "interesting" to watch a doc about lawyers who represent people they despise and wonder what at all would be interesting about that. yes the film leaves some questions unanswered and in the interest of covering more ground on its subject does not get bogged down with some details about the role in history of some of the figures involved. this hardly means that the film was formless, incoherent, but as another reviewer mentioned the film requires the viewer to think, does not hand over conclusions wrapped up in a nice package with a bloody bow on top. It seems indisputable that Verges was a *collaborator* with those of his clients involved in "the struggle" against colonialism, whom he viewed as nothing more or less than soldiers, some honorable and some not so much. He took on the indefensible case of barbie to hold up a mirror to France's record in algeria. I don't really understand peoples' confusion about schroder's point of view of this complicated but far from unfathomable character. I appreciate that this film points the way to other viewing cf the battle of algiers.

In the movies lawyers have often been depicted as honest guys who try to do their best to defend their client, but also as vicious fellas who do the job just for money or fame, even if that implies having dangerous clients (the culmination of such a concept was Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate). And somewhere in between we can put Jacques Vergès, the French attorney around whom Barbet Schroeder has constructed his new film, the documentary Terror's Advocate.

The title derives from the case that made Vergès famous at the beginning of his career: he was asked to defend a group of terrorists, responsible for a series of killings in Algeria. Of course, these men and women claimed to be freedom fighters, that what they did was the right thing to do. Vergès shared their ideals, managed to get them all out of jail and even married one of them. Subsequently he was always hired for controversial cases, and always ended up winning, even when his clients were former Nazis or Holocaust deniers.

The point of the movie is this: what should people think of Vergès? In fact, the opening caption says: "This film represents the director's personal point of view on Jacques Vergès", yet ironically Schroeder's opinion is not clear. While he seems to agree with the titular lawyer in the first half, saying that the Algerian terrorists had good intentions but used the wrong means (and it is hard not to think likewise, especially after seeing Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, based on those events), he does not directly express his feelings on Vergès' supposed ties with numerous German terrorists, some of which were involved in the 1972 Olympic Games massacre in Munich.

As a consequence, the ambiguous attorney never really comes off as either good or bad: he does seem to have some kind of moral standards (when asked if he would have defended Hitler, he answers: "I'd even defend Bush, but he would have to plead guilty") and claims he has just been doing his job the whole time, but he refuses to comment on his alleged connections with German criminals, spreading no further light on the matter, nor does he reveal exactly what happened during his 12-year "disappearance", which he apparently spent in Paris for purposes unknown.

Nonetheless, it shows that Vergès has two essential qualities for a good lawyer: charisma and eloquence. And he knowingly uses those tools while being interviewed, providing valuable insight on a previously unseen side of the legal system and making Terror's Advocate an intriguing picture, although clearly not to everyone's taste.

This movie gives an astonishingly revealing picture of the outspoken French lawyer Jacques Vergès, who defended such controversial figures as the terrorist Carlos, the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie or a member of the Algerian resistance against French rule, Djamila Bouhireb. Jacques Vergès even confirms that he would have defended Adolf Hitler IF he pleaded guilty (George Steiner did it in his formidable book 'In Bluebeard's Castle').

The movie reveals also the existence of a right-wing - religious financial network which provides judicial help for former fascists, like Nazi criminals. However, Barbet Schroeder could not uncover the exact nature of Jacques Vergès's pro-Palestinian actions or his support of the Red Khmer regime (on which he gives here, again controversially, a more or less positive comment) during the years of his life when he acted 'behind the scenes'.

This movie is a fascinating portrait of an iconoclastic rebel with a formidable intelligence and a profound analyzing capacity of the dark regions of man's nature and the amoral or immoral motives behind his behavior. By incorporating this behavior in a global context of 'a world at war, a resistance to a colonial rule or a defense of minorities', he could (can) denounce all the parties involved or attack frontally the existing global world order and its alleged morality. A must see.

A reminder that those that start out with the best intentions can become just as demented as the forces they are battling against. If not much worse. I suspect the reason the director made a straight documentary instead of a biographic film is that fact no one would believe such a character could possibly exist in real life.

Jacques Verges is the link that connects the most heinous figures of the twentieth century, but if you were just to go by his account you might almost be convinced he was a swell guy. The mental gymnastics this man performs to avoid admitting a single regret in his life is breathtaking (killing civilians kind of a gray area with Verges).

I suppose if you can convince yourself becoming Pol Pot's counsel and trusted confidante is worth abandoning your family for seven years, you are capable of justifying literally anything.