After savaging Greece's military junta in Z (1969), Costa-Gavras targets Stalinist barbarity in The Confession (1970). Based on Czech official Artur London's memoirs, it's an unfailingly bleak depiction of Communism as raw, dehumanizing power. Don't expect a good time.Gerard (Yves Montand) is a high-placed official in the Czechoslovakian government circa 1951. Police recently arrested a friend, and Gerard's tailed by men in unmarked cars. One day he's run off the road, kidnapped and thrown in prison. Through endless interrogations, Gerard discovers, who served in the Spanish Civil War's International Brigade. His wife (Simone Signoret) unsuccessfully petitions for his release, while his interrogator (Gabriele Ferzetti) urges swift confession to spare his life.
Like most Costa-Gavras movies, The Confession draws on a true-life incident: 1952's Slansky Trial, a purge of deviationists within the Czech Communist Party. Costa-Gavras spares his protagonist (and viewers) nothing: endless mind games, baffling Party illogic, mistreatment ranging from beatings to water torture to mock executions. Among other oddities, Gerard stands accused of "Titoism" for actions predating Tito's rise to power. It's rare to see such a harrowing look at Bolshevik atrocities: Hollywood anticommunism runs towards action flicks like Red Dawn. The closest I recall is Peter Glenville's The Prisoner (1955), a heavy-handed religious drama.
Compared to the darkly humorous Z, The Confession proves relentlessly crushing. Gerard's plight blends Kafka and Solzhenitsyn: he's arrested without formal charge, going from Cabinet Minister to criminal overnight. We're primed for A Man for All Seasons-style drama of conscience, but resistance merely invites retaliation. Even when Gerard cracks, he's rehearsed to ensure "sincerity." The film culminates in a show trial whose highlight is a suspect's pants falling down: the culmination of Bolshevik dehumanization.
Costa-Gavras's direction begins straightforward, detailing Gerard's imprisonment and suffering in nuts-and-bolts fashion. Yet The Confession grows more stylized: slow motion and rapid cutting, flashbacks to Gerard and his colleagues debating Communist dialectic, hallucinated montages of Soviet history and Stalinist propaganda. Editor Francoise Bonnot develops a pounding staccato rhythm, plunging between interrogations and torture sessions with rhythmic monotony. An ironic epilogue brings us to the Prague Spring, but seems superfluous.
Yves Montand gives a marvelous performance. More than ever resembling a Gallic Paul Scofield, Montand devolves from complacency to bewilderment to defeatism. Montand plays marvelously with bewildered look and depleted physicality; his bone-weary exhaustion in later scenes seems genuine. It's a convincing portrayal: Gerard is less hero than victim, ground to dust by the ideology he once served.
Gabriele Ferzetti (Once Upon a Time in the West) plays London's affable interrogator, feigning objectivity while civilly tormenting his prisoner. Simone Signoret (Army of Shadows) isn't used much better than Irene Pappas in Z, less character than emblem of her husband's martyrdom.
Admittedly, The Confession isn't familiar Western anticommunism: rather it's New Left outrage at socialism's supposed betrayal. Nonetheless, its damning depiction of Stalinist atrocitiy remains largely unmatched.
