CARLOS (Assayas, 2010) - it kind of boggles the mind that IRMA VEP, L’HEURE D’ETE and this movie were made by the same guy, but there you have it. What I liked about this one most was the look and feel of it: it doesn’t comment on how the world has changed since Carlos’ time as the top terrorist, but the sometimes faded, often overlit images (not to mention the hairdos) remind you constantly that this was a different time. I also admired that (aside from the last hour, which drags a bit), the 5.5 hours pass pretty fleetly, with the first hour of the second episode (the OPEC raid) being the most captivating.
Incidentally, the version I had did not have subtitles, and (as an experiment, though also partly out of laziness), I decided not to look them up. This means that I understood what was said in English and French fully, and almost all the German, but only the gist of what was said in Spanish, and nothing of the Arab, Russian, etc. I probaby missed a lot of the intrigue, but it was interesting nonetheless: you pay more attention to body language when you don’t know what people are saying, and it sometimes added a level of suspence.
