REVIEW: Olivier Assayas' Carlos Paints a Brilliant Portrait of an International Celebuterrorist

Carlos really is an international man of mystery, a guy who employs highly illegal and generally immoral tactics to fulfill his sketchy motives. In the movie's press notes, Assayas -- who wrote the script with Dan Franck -- notes that while the movie is based largely on fact, the events and characters still needed to be coaxed into a cogent dramatic shape. (The real Carlos is currently serving a prison sentence and had nothing to do with the film.) Assayas says he wishes he could have called the picture Carlos: A Novel, and particularly in its longer version, with its layers of narrative detail and succinct characterization, it does achieve a kind of Dickensian momentum. From one event to the next, Assayas always keeps you wondering where Carlos is headed. As so many of Assayas' pictures are -- from the glorious Irma Vep to the weird, gritty Boarding Gate -- Carlos is at least partly driven by restlessness. In Assayas' world, you can't work out problems, or understand people, when you're standing still: It's necessary to think on your feet, to keep all your sensors alight as you're moving from point A to point B.

That's especially true when you're talking about globe-hopping terrorists. But Ramírez's performance also captures a particularly interior restlessness: Carlos is always certain of what he wants, and he barks his demands accordingly. But at one point, when one of his comely sexual conquests laughs at his attachment to guns and weapons of all sorts (he's just put a live grenade to use as a lovemaking aid), his face takes on the look of a child whose feelings have been hurt. "Weapons are an extension of myself -- like my arms," he tells her. No wonder Carlos can't sit still for a minute: This is a man so big that he doesn't know where his body leaves off and the world begins.

In fact, at his cockiest, he seems to believe that the whole world lives inside his body: In one of the movie's most exhilarating moments, Ramírez's Carlos, youthful and fully, gloriously nude, admires himself in the mirror. (The music on the soundtrack is New Order's alternately bold and wistful "Dreams Never End," strains of which recur like punctuation marks throughout the movie.) As he takes stock of his magnificent tiger body, he's unable to resist taking the world -- so to speak -- in his hand. Carlos never once justifies or glorifies its nonhero's actions or motivations. What it shows, instead, is a man whose greatness is all in his own little head.

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