Life and crimes of Venezuelan spy Carlos the Jackal

DVD Letterbox is a sucker for spy films. I'm a boy, after all.

Edgar Ramirez

DVD Letterbox is a sucker for spy films. I'm a boy, after all.

However Carlos the Jackal, the new miniseries and feature about Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, isn't a spy film per se.

It is about a man who founded a terrorist organisation and who progressed in espionage terms through the 1970s and 80s into the realm of being, let's say, a highly respected, award-winning terrorist.

A spy? Not quite, although Olivier Assayas's thumping biopic shares the energy, period and visual style of many of the great spy movies of the 1970s including, naturally enough, the great The Day of the Jackal (based on the Frederick Forsyth novel Sanchez was thought to have owned; it was on that basis he was assigned the "Jackal" moniker).

Assayas made a three-part, 5 ½-hour series about Carlos's life and crimes for French television with the warning that it "must be viewed as a work of fiction" due to obvious grey areas in his life. He also cut a 2 ½-hour feature (Madman, MA15+, 158min, $29.95) although thankfully Madman will release both versions this week.

I'm surprised Assayas had such a bruising, slick feature in him. The director of Irma Vep, Demonlover and Clean has always tended, to my mind anyway, towards style before narrative or emotional cogency. His recent family drama Summer Hours was distinguished in that his less-showy film stylistically made emotional sense.

Carlos the Jackal is a wonderfully faithful period piece that contrasts most obviously, and to its benefit, with Steven Soderbergh's epic Che. Unlike with Che, Assayas paces vigorously between action scenes and doesn't attempt to diagnose greater meaning in Carlos's actions, which appear those of an egomaniac intent solely on creating mania.

After being chided for missing a protest march, Ilich notes "Words get us nowhere" recalling Mussolini's "Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and infinite scorn in our hearts".

Assayas has a stunning lead, Edgar Ramirez, who inhabits the role down to its sideburns, occasional pot belly and multilingual dialogue. He storms through the film with the intent of early Al Pacino. This is a great film in both forms.

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