The film is based on the 1968 book L’aveu, which was co-written by Artur London and his wife Lise. London, who was born in Austria-Hungary of Jewish descent, was a Czech communist politician who had fought against the fascists in Spain and had been arrested for anti-Nazi activities in Germany during World War II and spent time in a concentration camp. While he was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in Czechoslovakia, he was arrested along with 13 others (11 of whom, not surprisingly, were Jews) and forced after months of torture to confess to espionage and treason so that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin could purge dissenting views from the governments of the USSR’s satellite countries.

Yves Montand, who played a small, but crucial role in Z, plays London, who goes by the name Gérard, his French Resistance name. Screenwriter Jorge Semprún, who also penned Z, wastes no time, immediately establishing that Gérard is under surveillance for reasons that he does not understand. Soon he is arrested, after which his life descends into a nearly two-year odyssey of physical deprivation and emotional and physical torment, all of which is aimed at forcing him to confess to crimes he did not commit. His interrogators—primarily Czech secret police working under Soviet advisors—are many, and the relentlessness with which they come at him, day after day, asking the same questions over and over and forcing him to restate the same facts over and over, pouncing on even the tiniest inconsistency, works like erosion, slowly breaking him down mentally and physically to the point that he is incapable of refusing. It is not that he eventually relents, but rather that he is finally so worn down that he can no longer refuse, protest, or otherwise defend himself. The almost unbearable middle section of the film is an unrelentingly brutal depiction of a man being broken bit by bit.

And that is the film’s power. Without a great deal of aesthetic flourish or heightened dramatics—there is, for example, minimal use of the orchestral score by Giovanni Fusco—Costa-Gavras dramatizes Gérard’s ordeal and makes us feel his pain, his exhaustion, but most of all the terrible loss of his sense of self. He and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (a favorite of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut’s) deploy both documentary-like realism to bestow on the film’s events a sense of in-the-moment actuality and a series of carefully chosen subjective techniques like camera zooms, slow motion, and the disorienting zoom-in/dolly-out Vertigo effect to align us with Gérard’s experience. Gérard appears in virtually every scene in the film except a few that feature his strong-willed wife, played by Simone Signoret, and at times we flash back to his memories and flash forward to the years after his ordeal, which gives a crucial human dimension to the film’s depiction of politically orchestrated unreality. By the time we get to the actual trial, where Gérard and the other defendants have been coached into memorizing every word they say, we are, like him, simply worn down and accepting of what seems to be the inevitable.

Yves Montand, who lost 25 pounds to play the role, literally ages and shrinks before our eyes, his face becoming more gaunt, his eyes more hollow and glassy, his stance more bowed. Denied sleep and food for days at a time, forced to constantly pace the floor, and always moved about while blindfolded, Gérard’s existence becomes an exercise in inhumanity. His interrogators are all middle-age-looking bureaucrats with pressed suits and slicked hair, which makes their brutality all the more noxious. It is clear from the outset that justice fits nowhere in this equation; there is no sense that his interrogators want the truth, but instead a very particular confession that fits the political needs of “the party.” Gérard is told he must be a good communist and confess for the good of the party, which he rightly recognizes as logically conflicted: “If I have committed these crimes, why appeal to my loyalty?” he asks. “And if I am a good communist, then why I am here?”

Logic, justice, human decency—all of these are discarded in favor of political expediency, which is what made London’s book and Costa-Gavras’s film so dangerous for those who still believed in communism as a political ideal. By exposing the indefensible theatrics of a show trial designed to sacrifice innocent men for the supposed good of the party, The Confession revealed layers of moral and political rot that many wanted to keep hidden. The fact that the film’s flash forwards assure us before the end of the film that, despite his experiences, Gérard does not lose faith in the idea of communism tells us much about Costa-Gavra’s political intentions. Although it was criticized as such in numerous leftist circles at the time of its release, The Confession is not an anti-communist screed, but rather a cry against the inhumanity of any system that sacrifices the innocent for its own perceived good, a sin that was hardly unique to Stalinism.

Costa-Gavras’s film, which stays close to London’s memoir, certainly skirts around some difficult issues, particularly Gérard’s own culpability in supporting earlier purges that resulted in the execution of men as innocent of political crimes as he was. However, to expect the film to deal with all the complexities of London’s history in addition to his harrowing experience in the early 1950s is perhaps too much to asks of a two-hour feature film. As is, The Confession is still quite brave and absolutely essential in its depiction of how any political system is susceptible to totalitarianism.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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