{"id":172354,"date":"2020-11-09T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=172354"},"modified":"2020-11-08T04:56:48","modified_gmt":"2020-11-08T04:56:48","slug":"why-you-should-be-watching-the-film-z-right-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/11\/why-you-should-be-watching-the-film-z-right-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Should Be Watching the Film \u2018Z\u2019 Right Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Costa Gavras\u2019s classic antifascist thriller reminds us that the moment of reckoning constitutes not the end of the story, but the beginning.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Z 1969. (LMPC via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

3 Nov 2020 – <\/em>A<\/span> half-century later, I remember the exhilaration. My Greek boyfriend and I clutched hands in the front-row balcony of Boston\u2019s gracious Exeter Theater while convulsive music thundered up through our feet like a shock treatment. It was Mikos Theodorakis\u2019s soundtrack to Costa Gavras\u2019s Z<\/em>, a sexy, high-voltage film that inaugurated a genre: the antifascist thriller. Z<\/em> offered backstory to the 1967 junta that had just, with tacit US approval, toppled the democratically elected government in Greece and established post\u2013World War II Europe\u2019s most gruesome torture regime until the Republika Srpska\u2019s Omarska camp.<\/p>\n

Much of the junta\u2019s success derived from its creation of ad hoc domestic-terror brigades, its members conscripted from among the country\u2019s most economically desperate: underemployed men who might otherwise have been driven to selling their blood or their eyes to stay housed and fed. The film zeroes in on one savage attack: a charismatic opposition leader known only as The Deputy (played by Yves Montand and based on progressive legislator Grigoris Lambrakis<\/a>) is jumped and bludgeoned by freelance goons on a public square in full view of the assembled and untroubled police. The Deputy later dies from his injuries.<\/p>\n

Along comes an unlikely movie hero: the buttoned-up, robotically punctilious Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) with Coke-bottle eyeglasses and a just-the-facts manner. Though we later learn he\u2019s the son of an officer in the military police, The Magistrate\u2019s icy detachment makes plain he\u2019s doing no one any favors, whether the witness he\u2019s put in the hot seat is a street bully or a general. In the dark theater my boyfriend alternately cursed and whooped at the villains and heroes his motherland had engendered: wincing at the vainglorious imbeciles in uniform who never doubt their impermeable shield of rank, and cheering The Magistrate\u2019s pocket-protector nerd so nimbly lining up his ducks for prosecution.<\/p>\n

If you already know Z<\/em>, you\u2019ll remember an early scene in which a clutch of top-brass buffoons, their chests bristling with medals and ribbons, sit with upper-level bureaucrats in a government hearing room, ostensibly for an agronomy lecture. But the lecturer lards his words about \u201cforeign mildew infestations\u201d of the country\u2019s vineyards with warnings about an alien-ideology attack on the minds of young workers and students. One security-forces colonel takes the mic to report: \u201cScientists have announced a major increase in sunspots\u201d\u2013a phenomenon that, the colonel claims, is the Almighty\u2019s response to anti-war activism. \u201cGod,\u201d he intones, \u201ccasts no light upon the communists.\u201d Extolling the achievements of occidental Christian civilization, the colonel unveils his plan to introduce the \u201cantibodies in the fight against infection: the honest citizens, the healthy elements of society\u201d who happen to be that same street-recruited rapid deployment force. No need for the cops to beat up demonstrators when \u201chonest citizens\u201d are happy to do it for them.<\/p>\n

The Magistrate does a breathtakingly comprehensive job of getting the goods on all the perps, from the hired muscle to the high-ranking officers, whom he charges with first-degree murder and abuse of authority. When this good news breaks, a young lawyer from the late Deputy\u2019s inner circle hastens to the house of his widow (Ir\u00e8ne Pappas) to exult: \u201cIt\u2019s as if he were still alive! It\u2019s a real revolution! The extremists will be swept away! The elections will be a landslide victory!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what happens right after the lawyer\u2019s exuberant announcement that makes Z<\/em> a must-watch film for 2020, because nothing in his prophecy turns out to be true. Seven key witnesses die suddenly of heart attacks, car crashes, industrial accidents, and an eighth-story defenestration that the police rule \u201can escape attempt.\u201d The new head of state security offers assurances, in all seven cases, that \u201cfoul play is ruled out.\u201d The two hands-on assassins end up with wrist-slap sentences, while all charges against the officers are dropped. The Magistrate is dismissed; the coup gets underway. (Christos Sartzetakis<\/a>, the real-life magistrate, was later tortured and imprisoned.)<\/p>\n

For the next seven years, a culture war invaded Greek citizens\u2019 lives at such a banal, quotidian level that, had it not been so savagely enforced, the list would have read like outtakes from a Monty Python script. As Z<\/em> chronicles in its final moments, the things outlawed included sociology, miniskirts, modern math, the Beatles, labor unions, long hair, strikes, freedom of the press, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Twain, Beckett, Pinter, Albee\u2014even Aristophanes, Aeschylus, and Euripides. It likewise became a crime to say that Socrates was gay.<\/p>\n