Idealism, solidarity, sex, philosophy - and contempt for human life : Carlos

"Carlos," Part one of the 3-part TV miniseries (it also exists in movie version) is powerful and exciting and chilling, very fast-pace account of the rise of an ideological terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, in 1970s Europe - film begins as a young Carlos offers his services to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at HQ in Beirut, is assigned to an underling job in Paris, shipped to London for an assassination that goes wrong, and then he's off onto bigger and more dangerous jobs, including airport attacks, hostage-taking - ultimately, at end of part one, someone rats him out and he shoots 3 French detectives and takes off. The pace is rapid and keeps you totally riveted to the action, which is relentless. Maybe it's a little too fast a pace - we learn about Carlos entirely from the outside, from what he does, and very little about who he is and what he thinks and what made him the way he is, he never reflects and there's no back story - which is kind of confusing at times, very difficult to keep straight his many relations with various women. Maybe that's the point - he's rootless. He's not a "hired gun," however (unlike the namesake in The Day of the Jackal); he's ideologically committed. M. wondered whether this kind of film would glorify terrorism, but I think the depiction is so brutal and vulgar that it's unlikely to do so. The terrorists here aren't heroes, even if their cause may at times be just - they're thugs, and their lives are awful. It also captures the era very well - the idealism, the odd mixture of solidarity and sex and folk art and philosophy and contempt for bourgeois values, strangely juxtaposed with contempt for human life.