Nada [1974] [DVD]

Claude Chabrol's 1974 Nada is in some ways a change of pace for the master of the corrupt bourgeois, yet in others is true to form. While the focus of the plot is the kidnapping of the American ambassador to France by disaffected French leftists and anarchists, the emphasis on their personal psychologies is as pointed as ever from the perspective of a film director who has made a career of juxtaposing the haves and the have-nots, those who sit back and bask in their wealth and those who have to resort to other means to attain it--usually criminal. Or those who just plain resent the wealthy and do something about it, even if the resenters don't become wealthy themselves.

The action here is very well paced and the acting is exactly what it should be from a great cast including Fabio Testi and Mariangela Melato (from the great Lina Wertmuller film Swept Away). Rather than lampooning the police as he did in Innocents with Dirty Hands, Chabrol here presents them as brutal workers who do everything possible to get information. The kidnappers are all disaffected, but in different ways. One is a dedicated Marxist. One is a leftist-anarchist. One is essentially a professional radical mercenary. One is a complete anarchist prone to getting drunk.

Chabrol delights in contrasting those who view activity as a luxury and those who know it is a duty--and the performance of that duty by the latter is often done with enough intensity to become violent, quite easily in fact. The Justice Minister, for example, sleeps in opulent surroundings and has a wife looking suspiciously like Marie Antoinette. Likewise the ambassador dallies in a brothel with a whore wearing flimsy garments. Meanwhile the cops and the kidnappers do the dirty work that forms the meat of the story.

An interesting film by the great Claude Chabrol who does have his occasional slipups (Innocents with Dirty Hands, The Swindle, e.g.) but who in this film proves he can tell a tale that veers from his typical fare--and do it quite well indeed. Definitely recommended.

In a time when the constitution and principals the United States were founded on are trampled underfoot by an administration desperate to distract attention from its own internal problems, where the Geneva Convention, human rights and foreign sovereignty are unapologetically discarded, a thriller about the state taking illegal action that far exceeds that of the terrorists they are countering might seem appropriate. However, if you want to see a film about that, try Ed Zwick's flawed THE SIEGE instead, because NADA is one of the most infantile 'political' thrillers ever made. Like Robert Altman's PRET-A-PORTER, the director has taken on a subject he seems completely ignorant of, and imprints his ignorance on almost every frame.

His terrorists are a wildly unconvincing group of stereotypes - Fabio Testi dresses as if he were auditioning for MAD Magazine's 'Spy vs. Spy' strip, Michel Duchaussoy behaves like an absurd KIDS IN THE HALL send up of the sociology professor from Hell, Mariangela Melato a cardboard middle-class revolutionary wannabe - who behave at every unconvincing plot turn as if they want to be caught. The corrupt authorities fare a little better, but are still painted in unconvincingly broad strokes.

It is possible to make a smart film about dumb people (cf ELECTION), but this is a moronic film about dumb people made by people who think they're intellectuals who are talking down to the masses. In truth, were one to recast Testi, Duchaussoy and Melato with Jim Varney, Johnny Knoxville and Shannon Tweed, the result would actually be to raise the intellectual content of the film, not lower it.

Chabrol might just have got away with his characters and events if he took them seriously, but his staging is so inept (the fight scenes would embarrass a kindergarten class while the shooting of the kidnapping is more inept than the kidnapping itself) and his inability to get his cast to perform with at least some approximation of recognisable human behaviour so blatant that it is actually embarrassing to watch (special mention must be made here of Duchaussoy: so very good in Chabrol's QUE LA BETE MUERE, he is stunningly bad here in a performance that is so far over the top it's back again).

Chabrol has made some fine films, but you would never guess it from this amateurish mess - a newcomer to his work would never want to see another of his films after this, which would be a great shame. Utter drivel, and a sad waste of a potentially interesting material. One star out of ten - and that's being very generous.

The DVD is the cut reissue version (27 minutes shorter), although this is no great loss, so it's hard to feel aggrieved by the fact. Ironically, as the worst title in Pathfinder's Chabrol collection, this boasts one of the best transfers: still not perfect, but a lot better than the poor standards conversions from PAL to NTSC on the likes of LA FEMME INFIDELE and LE BOUCHER - Chabrol films well worth seeing.

This is a film from another era, when there were anarchist and "red" terrorists on the left in Europe. The story is about a flakey group, NADA, that hatches a plot - to kidnap the American ambassador in his favorite brothel - that is supposed to ignite the "sleeping public" at last to revolutionary action. The amazing thing is that I met people who would talk like this when I first came to Europe, all fired up with a socialist zeal and making assumptions about the allegiance of the working class. This story shows where that kind of reasoning leads when linked to terrorist action, and it isn't revolution, but instead is a series of mishaps that leads to a violent climax.

What is original in the film is how it parodies that authorities of the French state, starting with the self-serving Minister of the Interior and ending with his brutal patsy, a police chief unafraid to carry out orders that are only implied. The cynicism, which tolerates and resigns the viewer to the messiest of imbroglios, is unlike anything that you can see in the clean universe of Hollywood. After the climax, with a manhunt still on and a hostage unlawfully held and tortured by the state, events take an unexpected turn that is wonderfully surprising, even funny, yet supremely awful. It is vintage Chabrol, who has been called the French Hitchcock for good reason. Virtually everyone gets theirs in one way or another.

This is very fun, but the execution of the film is somewhat clunky, and the print could be better, though this is from the mid-1970s. It isn't slick, but there is a realism to it that is honestly brutal.

Recommended. It is food for thought in this time when we are so paranoid about terrorists and too easily assume that we are in the right.

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