Z

Costa-Gavras's political thriller returns to us after nearly three decades in a beautiful new print that restores Raoul Coutard's crisp yet textured cinematography and underscores the staccato editing rhythms. The movie keeps tap-tapping in your head as you walk out of the theater. This is the film that established Costa-Gavras, a Greek émigré working in France, as a first-rate craftsman; it also helped publicize the cause of Greek democracy, which had been overthrown by the junta two years earlier, in the wake of the shocking Lambrakis affair.

Z (the title is explained in the coda) never mentions Greece, but it makes no bones about whose story it's dramatizing -- especially since Mikis Theodorakis's theme music invokes his homeland in every phrase. Yves Montand, in a graceful performance, plays the Lambrakis character, a distinguished foreign peacenik who's brutally assaulted after he makes a speech at a rally. The corruption brought to light during an investigation of the incident indicts the entire military establishment.

Costa-Gavras is neither subtle nor profound here; those are qualities that would crop up later, in movies (The Confession, released the following year, and 1989's Music Box) that no one paid much attention to. In Z he's a technician operating a politically loaded gun. But what a technician! He stages the crowd scenes impeccably and uses jump cuts and leaping continuity to make it appear that the case, under the expert supervision of the investigating judge, is literally breaking open. (As the judge, Jean-Louis Trintignant springs his performance with tiger-like suppleness and precision.) But he knows exactly when to pause: on Montand, suddenly recalling a moment of domestic betrayal, or on the magnificent Irene Papas, who, as his wife, has perhaps 10 minutes of screen time and fewer than five lines yet manages to create an entire character and suggest a breathtaking emotional range.

In 1969, Z made left-leaning audiences laugh in appreciation at the bumbling, self-aggrandizing military bureaucrats. (One of them, arrested at last for his role in the attack, answers the disingenuous question of a young photojournalist -- "Are you a victim of injustice, like Dreyfus?" -- with the indignant protest, "Dreyfus was guilty!") The change in political climate hasn't dampened the film's pleasures (including Jorge Semprun's witty dialogue), or loosened its grip. At the Brattle this Friday and Saturday, October 24 and 25.

-- Steve Vineberg