Costa Gavras' "Special Section" takes place during the German occupation of France. A German officer has been killed by a group of Marxist "freedom fighters", an act which provokes the Nazis into offering an ultimatum to France's compliant Vichy government: execute six Frenchmen or else.
Anxious to placate the Nazis (and save their own necks), the Vichy government, working through France's Justice Department, sets up a "special section" comprising a small group of ambitious and amoral judges. They're ruthless careerists with no qualms about killing their own countrymen. And so new laws are passed and several innocent men are selected for execution. End result: Frenchmen dying at the hands of Frenchmen. Sensing an opportunity, France then uses this "Nazi ultimatum" as a pretext to expunge others who previously stood up against the state.
Like Gavras' later "Amen", "Special Section" attempts to map WW2's vast web of appeasements, double standards, double binds, blind-eyes and complicitous dealings. It is not only in this way that the Holocaust was itself "mobilized" across Europe, but how France, and other nations, became brothers with those whom they opposed. Indeed, Nazi Germany was intimately bound with Western (France, American, British) Imperialism.
Gavras maintains a breezy, fast pace throughout "Special Section", but his film too heavily oozes moral indignation, is filled with stereotypes, caricatures and walking mouthpieces, and too often substitutes nuance for obviousness. The film neither shock nor haunts, though Gavaras' somewhat detached tone – he chronicles events like a documentarian – does at times lend the film a machine-like, inexorable quality. Among the cast, Michael Lonsdale, who found himself in many of the better political thrillers of the 60s and 70s, shines.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "The Sorrow and the Pity".
Anxious to placate the Nazis (and save their own necks), the Vichy government, working through France's Justice Department, sets up a "special section" comprising a small group of ambitious and amoral judges. They're ruthless careerists with no qualms about killing their own countrymen. And so new laws are passed and several innocent men are selected for execution. End result: Frenchmen dying at the hands of Frenchmen. Sensing an opportunity, France then uses this "Nazi ultimatum" as a pretext to expunge others who previously stood up against the state.
Like Gavras' later "Amen", "Special Section" attempts to map WW2's vast web of appeasements, double standards, double binds, blind-eyes and complicitous dealings. It is not only in this way that the Holocaust was itself "mobilized" across Europe, but how France, and other nations, became brothers with those whom they opposed. Indeed, Nazi Germany was intimately bound with Western (France, American, British) Imperialism.
Gavras maintains a breezy, fast pace throughout "Special Section", but his film too heavily oozes moral indignation, is filled with stereotypes, caricatures and walking mouthpieces, and too often substitutes nuance for obviousness. The film neither shock nor haunts, though Gavaras' somewhat detached tone – he chronicles events like a documentarian – does at times lend the film a machine-like, inexorable quality. Among the cast, Michael Lonsdale, who found himself in many of the better political thrillers of the 60s and 70s, shines.
7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "The Sorrow and the Pity".