Carlos

This is about Carlos the Jackal, aka Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, who’s a terrorist and a revolutionary.  He’s all about socialism and Palestine and he’ll do whatever he needs to help those causes.  Unfortunately that means killing people and blowing up buildings and shit.

This is supposed to be a true story but before you even start watching any movie they tell you right off the bat that this whole thing should be taken as fiction.  The events in this series did actually happen but we don’t know very much about Carlos himself or his connections so the filmmakers gave it their best shot at filling that in which could be accurate or completely wrong.  Since this was made for entertainment purposes I’m sure there are plenty of embellishments but that doesn’t make this thing any less cool or the events that they show us any less horrible.

Since I just saw the Mesrine series there’s going to be a bunch of comparisons between the two because they share many similarities.  So let’s start with the first one which is that Carlos is all about Edgar Ramirez (The Bourne Ultimatum, Domino).  Just like Mesrine this guy is charismatic as shit but not in the same way.  Carlos can’t really interact with…actually he doesn’t interact with anyone that doesn’t believe in the same things that he does.  He’s starts off as a Palestine sympathizer but quickly expands his views to wanting to topple all capitalist countries.  But throughout the films he changes and does less terrorist acts as the years go by even though he still talks pretty much the same revolutionary chatter.  Carlos is crazier and more radical than Mesrine though.  Carlos wants to change the world and is willing to die for his cause while Mesrine claims to be a revolutionary but is just a straight up gangster.  It’s all about him and the kind of publicity that he can get.  Carlos goes back and forth claiming that he’s doing all of this for a cause but he clearly likes to take charge and have the attention be focused on him.  He has a hard time taking orders from people and at the same time he wants everyone to take orders from him. 

Carlos talks like a dreamer and in such an idealist way that you can’t help but fall into his insanity.  He’s so damn confident that he and his gang can achieve anything that you don’t doubt his abilities for a second.  But you’re never really with Carlos like you were with Mesrine.  With Mesrine you got tricked into thinking that this was a killer and a brutal criminal but he had a heart of gold.  You could almost forgive all of the terrible shit that he does because he appears to have some kind of code of ethics (even though he really doesn’t).  Carlos is portrayed as more of a curiosity and someone that you would never actually want to come in contact with.  Carlos is frightening through and through even when he’s being nice to his friends or mistresses.    

Ramirez, like Cassel as Mesrine, transformed himself for this role.  He goes through a lot of haircut and facial hair styles and gains and losses weight all over the place.  I think this went a little further than in Mesrine though because Ramirez’s weight seems to fluctuate more extremely.  Yea I know all the fat stuff and all the skinny stuff was shot separately but that’s still fucking dedication to character.  The three films trace over twenty years of this guy’s life and Ramirez looks so different by the end.  Make up did a great job making him look older and younger and Ramirez also did great acting older and younger.  When he’s an older man he doesn’t do much anymore except hide away in countries like Syria and Sudan but you can still see the passion and fire in his eyes. 

Throughout the entire series Carlos is smoking a cigarette or a cigar in almost every scene and he drinks gallons and gallons of whiskey.  That much smoking and drinking of hard liquor looks so fucking badass on screen and I’m having a hard time remembering the last time I saw so much of that in a movie that came out recently.  In one scene towards the end of the third film though he drinks a 7Up and it was a little relieving.  It was sort of like when you see Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas drink a beer and you feel like you can breathe again because he’s not guzzling grain alcohol for a change.

The first part (of a three part, 5 ½ hour series) starts with Carlos’ life when he first joins a terrorist organization in Yemen.  He travels to Paris and does some operations there but it’s mostly build up.  We have an entire movie to get to know this character and some of the terrible shit that he was involved with like the bombing of several stores.  It ends at just the right spot with a cliffhanger.  Overall this first film may seem a bit boring but stick with it because…

The second movie is the best installment in the series.  This one is mostly about a plot that he launched to bust in on an OPEC meeting in Vienna and kidnap all of the members.  Carlos comes in looking like Che and seems crazier and more determined than ever.  He doesn’t want money, he wants to kill several oil ambassadors because their countries have betrayed his cause.  Supposedly the filmmakers reconstructed these scenes from eye witness accounts at the time which is cool and the whole situation keeps getting more interesting.  Of course you’re going to have to watch it to see how the event unfolds but if this was the only movie made then it would be pretty satisfying I think.  I mean it would have to be prefaced with some intro so you know who this guy is but it’s the one in the series that can almost stand on its own.

The third part is a total let down.  We keep following Carlos as he goes from country to country and starts a family and stuff but for the most part not much happens.  There’s some talk about a big operation that you think Carlos will take on but it just doesn’t lead to anything.  It was such a bummer to have the whole thing grind to a halt especially after the second movie raised the stakes.  But I mean this was how the man’s life went so I can’t complain that much.  There’s a lot of detail in all three pictures and I like that and I can’t really think of stuff that could’ve been cut out because these are three distinct periods in Carlos’ life.  I dunno.  But just like Mesrine I feel like I accomplished a goal.  I saw this deal through and can boast about it.  I liked following the times of this interesting and complex character.  So even though the third movie was kinda boring it gave further insight and almost (almost) made me wish this was split up into four installments and Mesrine into three so we could get even more detail…almost.

This series was directed by Olivier Assayas and I haven’t seen any of his other films so there’s not much I can say about him.  But Carlos looks beautiful and the films were shot very nicely.  There are lots of exotic locales and tons of characters to soak up.  It was cool that Assayas used real news footage from the aftermath of some of the terrorist attacks.  It helped to ground the films and remind us that this shit went down in real life.  Also, the use of language was pretty astonishing throughout.  All of the different characters speak in their respective language or speak in the language of the country that they’re in.  So there’s French, Spanish, German, Hungarian and tons of others.  They even have some Japanese in there.  It’s impressive that Assayas went for this instead of just shooting the whole thing in one language to make it easier.  Ramirez as Carlos speaks three, four or five (I lost count) languages himself.  All of the different languages gave the series a feeling of authenticity.

Again, like with Mesrine I can’t really recommend that you only see the first two movies ‘cause you’re going to wanna know what happens to this guy.  It’s an interesting series but it isn’t full of action like the Mesrine films.  Things get confusing fast and unless you have some knowledge of this subject beforehand (I didn’t) you’re probably gonna be lost a fair chunk of the time (I was).  But I do like that these films don’t insult the audience’s intelligence.  They throw a lot of information at you and pretty fast but they know that we can handle it, right?  So if you’re looking for a three day or weekend project then I would recommend taking on this series instead of catching up on work or fixing the toilet.