Costa-Gavras turns a real Greek assassination into a thriller that moves like a chase and argues like a prosecutor. Raoul Coutard’s camera and Françoise Bonnot’s cutting still feel modern; the villains are drawn a shade too broad. Worth anyone’s evening.
Z begins with a lecture. A gendarmerie general stands before a hall of officers and warns them about mildew on the vines, and by the end of his sentence the mildew has become the left, an infection to be sprayed. It is a joke, and it also tells you what the next two hours are about: men in uniform who think of themselves as gardeners. The film is set in an unnamed Mediterranean country, and a title card says any resemblance to real events is deliberate. Everyone in 1969 knew that meant Greece and the killing of the deputy Grigoris Lambrakis. Costa-Gavras made a thriller out of it, and the thriller is a good one: fast, plain about its anger, and after more than fifty years still hard to sit still through.
The deputy is played by Yves Montand and credited only as Z. He is a doctor, a pacifist and a man other people are willing to be hit for, and Montand gives him a tired, decent face and not much more than a quarter of an hour of screen time. He arrives to speak against nuclear weapons, the hall he was promised is withdrawn, a smaller one is found, and a crowd of hired thugs waits outside while the police look at their shoes. Then a three-wheeled van comes across the square. Irene Papas, as his wife Hélène, arrives after the fact and barely speaks. She does most of her work sitting on a hospital bench, and it is enough.
Raoul Coutard shoots it as if he had been sent to cover a riot and got lucky. The camera is handheld in the crowds, on long lenses across the square, and the light is whatever was there. Françoise Bonnot cuts it so that memory keeps interrupting testimony: a witness starts a sentence in the magistrate’s office and we are back in the square before he finishes it, and the club comes down again from a slightly different angle. The film returns to that blow perhaps half a dozen times. We flinched at every one, and that is the intention; the officials keep calling it an accident, and the editing keeps showing us that it was not.
The second hour belongs to Jean-Louis Trintignant, as the Examining Magistrate given the case in the expectation that he will close it. He wears dark glasses indoors, says almost nothing and writes everything down, and Trintignant plays him as a man who is not brave so much as tidy. The facts do not add up, and he cannot leave them like that. Jacques Perrin’s Photojournalist, all cheek and flashbulb, does the legwork the police will not. Georges Géret and Marcel Bozzuffi, as the two men in the van, are the film’s best idea. They are not monsters. They are poor, vain and easily flattered, and the film is clear that the people who flattered them are the ones who matter.
Mikis Theodorakis, whose music the Greek junta had banned, supplies a score that is mostly bouzouki and drums and refuses to slow down. It runs under the marches, the chases and the interrogations, and it gives the film a pulse the plot alone would not have. Jacques d’Ovidio’s production design keeps the town anonymous: bare offices, a hospital corridor, a square that could be anywhere on the Mediterranean.
The flaws are in the uniforms. Pierre Dux’s General Missou and Julien Guiomar’s Colonel are drawn thick. They bluster, they contradict each other under questioning, and they never once seem clever. Some critics, then and since, have found the film’s sympathies too easy and its villains too stupid to be frightening, and there is something in that. A subtler film would have given the generals a good argument and let us watch it fail. Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún, adapting Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel, are not trying to understand the men who ordered the killing. They are trying to catch them, and the film moves with the impatience of people who know the clock is against them.
The last stretch takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it is delivered flatly, in a few minutes, and that it made us angrier than anything in the two hours before it. Plenty of political thrillers since have copied the method. Few have been this angry. Watch it with the sound up; Theodorakis will not let you drift, and neither will Bonnot.
