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'Terror's Advocate'

By Cole Smithey
Maui Time | October 16, 2007
Terror’s Advocate

Only director Barbet Schroeder (“General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait”) could capture this complex and engaging look at French lawyer Jacques Verges, the man who represented such villains as Nazi Klaus Barbie and café bomber Djamila Bouhired, who Verges married and had two children before vanishing for eight years. Schroeder doesn’t judge his subject so much as allow Verges to give an open monologue of self-representation about his varied past. When Verges says that he’d defend George Bush for war crimes if Bush pled guilty, we begin to understand the reverse psychology of a man who romantically affiliated with the wife of Carlos “the Jackal.” As the son of a Vietnamese mother and a father from the remote Reunion Island, Verges and his twin brother fought in De Gaulle’s infantry before Verges went on to study at the Sorbonne with Pol Pot as a chummy classmate. “Terror’s Advocate” elucidates the character and defense mechanisms of a man much more complex and radical than the George Bushes of the world. For that reason alone, this documentary is an indispensable document of eccentric rationalization at work on an international platform of judicial prudence.

138 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

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Tags: Barbet Schroeder, Terror's Advocate

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