Concessions

You know what I like about the winter? You can stay home and watch a
movie. Cozy times. You know what I like about the summer? You can go to
an air-conditioned theater and watch a movie. Refreshing,
globe-warming, energy-sucking times. (Thanks, chemicals! Screw you,
arctic walrus!) Perhaps you have noticed lately that light and heat
are falling down from the sky in great big amounts, burning us and
making us ache and sweat and become extra drunk and swim in warm lakes
until we are covered in lake gunk. My stars, it’s hot! So, I ask you:
Is there any better way to combat heat exhaustion than with the 40th
anniversary rerelease of a supercool French political-conspiracy
procedural? I CERTAINLY CANNOT THINK OF ONE!

Going into Costa-Gavras’s talky 1969 political thriller Z, I
knew only two things: (1) that Pauline Kael had called the film “almost
intolerably exciting” and (2) that an arctic walrus Roger Ebert had
called the film “almost unbearably exciting.” Gauntlet thrown, Ebert
and Kael! Would I be able to tolerate and/or bear the
excitingness of Z and prove these enormous wimpy babies
wrong once and for all? WELL, WOULD I? (I have tolerated much worse!
[Lake gunk!!!])

I began finding out forthwith. Z opens with a dull lecture
and some close-up toothpicking. Everyone is handsome and creepy in that
peculiar way of French men—where they look like they have too
many bones in their faces (you know?). I found this bearable. I
tolerated. Round one, Lindy West.

In an unspecified European nation (filming location: Algiers;
language: French; source material: Greek) in the pinch of a right-wing
military government, the leftist opposition leader prepares for an
upcoming speech advocating nuclear disarmament. Outside, a riot
percolates: wild escalation and abrupt relaxation, a crush of
bodies, humans clubbing humans like baby seals. Tension level:
moderate. Round two, inconclusive.

The lefty leader, of course, goes on with the show, despite all
signs pointing to the quaint village of Clubskull-upon-Brain-squishe.
YOU HEARD ME. He strolls stolidly toward his doom, until his doom
clubs him over the head. The police go a-cover-uppin’, a scrappy
little photojournalist goes a-diggin’, and all the perseverance in the
world can’t dent the bureaucratic bulk. Bearableness: questionable.
Round three, hmph.

In our Daily Show–dependent modern lives, the coping
mechanisms of choice seem to be farce and outsized disbelief (see In
the Loop). Z takes on government corruption with eerie
uncertainty and shaky paranoia wrapped in sobering blandness: gray
suits, filing cabinets, calm threats. Witnesses disappear, journalists
are jailed, assassins aren’t, business as usual. Tolerability: GAH!
It’s the opposite of emotional air-conditioning.