State Of Siege

"State of Siege" sets out to shake you. It's directed by Costa-Gavras, who regularly recreated scenarios and situations -- many of them having since been brushed out of the history books -- that cast an ugly light on western politics and economic structures. "Siege" is set in an unnamed country, where a U.S. contractor (Yves Montand) is kidnapped by rebel forces, who threaten to execute him if their demands for a prisoner-swap aren't met. The contractor is slowly revealed to be higher up on the command chain than anyone expected. Then he's revealed to have helped perpetrate acts of torture, signed off on by the American government. There may be moments here that skew to the side of didacticism. But you never feel you're being preached to -- you feel that you've been through an experience.

That's thanks to Costa-Gavras' unrelentingly kinetic construction. It's not just the camera-whips or the quick quits-it's the way "Siege" is designed to hop from character-to-character, from timeline-to-timeline, and from observation-to-analysis. It's cinematic journalism -- a precursor to everything that a movie like "Zero Dark Thirty" was chasing after. The initial kidnapping here happens when five cars block in the contractor. Most filmmakers would just leave it at that. Not Costa-Gavras: Using rhythmic editing, he shows us how all five cars were heisted. He shows us the people who got left on the sides of the street. He weaves them all together into a tapestry of social action -- the rich, the poor, the kidnappers, the kidnapped, the negotiators, and the objects used in the action, all tied together by aesthetics. Costa-Gavras had the rare ability to make political processes and physical occurrences into pop poetry.

The Blu-ray release of the film contains a couple extras that afford us a greater insight into the director's working methods. The centerpiece is a 30-minute long conversation with Costa-Gavras recorded at the Cinematheque Francaise earlier this year. He speaks about his choice to leave the country in his unnamed, and the real-life case that served as the inspiration for "Siege," among other topics. There's also a short NBC News broadcast regarding the historical figure (Dan Mitrione) that Yves Montand's character was based on.

Those clips end up recreated in the film itself, so the disc provides a literal continuation between fact and fiction. But Costa-Gavras' passion for the issues at hand (not just the facts) is palpable, and it seeps into the movie at intermittent moments. There's a few passages -- like a scene where cops run ragged across a pathway, trying to take down amplifiers as they spout forward far-left rally cries -- where you can feel him bending the bounds of plausibility in order to visually represent a political argument. But those political pushes are a necessary part of the texture.

"State of Siege"
Blu-ray
Criterion.com
$39.95