With its warnings against government tyranny and ideological cultists, Costa-Gavras’s classic is newly relevant.
Since we’re unlikely to get a Hollywood movie that honestly dramatizes the actual motivations behind the nationally televised J6 hearings, the closest we can get to a true, terrifying explanation of their un-American nature is Costa-Gavras’s 1970 film The Confession, now available on Criterion DVD.
Costa-Gavras confronts the 1952 Rudolf Slánský show trials that involved 14 high-ranking members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) who were forced to confess that they were agents of Western imperialism. Yves Montand plays Gérard, a figure based on Artur London, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs, one of the loyal Communists who complied with the trial-by-terror, so great was their loyalty to the Communist Party. Parallels to J6 are found in that prosecutors’ dishonest pretense of “defending democracy” regardless of due process and other terrorist tactics.
Although the American press of the 1950s reported the trials as “Tragi-Comedy in Prague,” Costa-Gavras approaches Gérard/London’s experience in his signature style of political suspense. After the thrills of his 1969 political action-movie hit Z, Costa-Gavras’s technique refined to Godardian purpose. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard and editor Françoise Bonnot deepen the visual approach and sharply arrange vivid, unsettlingly humanizing details of Gérard/London’s physical and intellectual ordeal. Montand, a movie star, can express our despair and then go on to demonstrate mankind’s callous survival. Their work is intensely thrilling while insisting we take complicated political history seriously.
The mystery of Gérard/London’s political devotion — his willing masochism — helps us comprehend to some degree how American politicians and media can dismantle the very principles they profess to believe.
Costa-Gavras exposes what has historically been communism’s deadly, ruthless power struggle. He evokes political paranoia, using quick montage, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and spookily precise visual clarity to portray both the 1950s setting and Gérard’s contemporary reminiscence. The most indelible images show Gérard in blinding goggles with a noose around his neck, or seated in a courtroom with others on trial for their lives, before judges enforcing regime dominance.
However different the particulars are from the current American show trial, The Confession still goes to the heart of specious judicial behavior — and the nightmare of a country and its media accepting it as normal. (One scene reveals the indictment proceedings broadcast beyond the courtroom to bureaucrat offices and factory workers, and “soon to be shown in cinemas.”)
Set in Czechoslovakia but filmed in France (Costa-Gavras being a Greek exile), The Confession seems a quintessential foreign film. Yet its dark, scary anti-liberty process no longer seems Kafkaesque — especially at a moment when American citizens have been made political prisoners and elected officials charge their elected opponents as criminals. When the Czech central committee assumes emergency control, claiming, “We represent the power of the proletariat,” it’s not far from a Covid-era American’s worst nightmare. Costa-Gavras and screenwriter Jorge Semprún’s approach doesn’t allow Kafkaesque sentiment, so the film stays tough and brilliant.
The patchwork of history, paranoia, and critical reflection examines coldblooded power and blind faith through coerced confession by petty bureaucrats who inflict different methods of persecution. The storytelling is complicated but lucid. For example, the triplicate scene of an emaciated Montand repeating his ignorance about the unmasked American spy Noel Field foreshadows the Russian-collusion fabrications that U.S. media would launch against the Trump administration. It conveys betrayal and self-betrayal, revealing the way leftist fanatics contrive their own political fantasies.
This is Costa-Gavras’s most politically sophisticated film. One interrogator reflects today’s urgent claims when he says, “You don’t understand the ABCs of dialectics. The past must be judged in the light of truths established today.” Semprún knows all about commie lingo — even better, he and Costa-Gavras reveal the craziness of political zealotry. Gérard is told, “Confession is the highest form of self-criticism. Self-criticism is the principle virtue of a Communist. It’s a faith.” He believes in the “anti-state conspiracy” and so makes his false confession “in the name of religion, for at this time the state is a religion.”
The Confession explores the secret tactics of government duress, torture, and intimidation that no longer seem otherworldly. As Americans, we never before had to deal with the fact of the government brazenly constructing testimony to influence public opinion. Costa-Gavras re-creates that outrage as a relevant history lesson. Gérard/London knows the trial is a sham, yet as a true believer he goes along and participates in it because, as a Communist, his sense of justice has been warped. Amazingly, Costa-Gavras understands this irony and yet, instead of whitewashing history, still portrays the horrifically vicious cycle.
Seen in light of the current J6 “hearings,” The Confession privileges us with an extraordinary witnessing — and warning. Years later in a public square, Gérard/London meets one of his interrogators, who asks, “What happened to us? Do you understand it at all?”
