In its full-length version, Carlos stretches out to a languorous yet surprisingly taut five and a half hours, though it has also been cut down to an equally effective -- though not as detailed -- two-and-a-half-hour version. The full version, which I have affectionately dubbed Maxi-Carlos, recently aired on the Sundance Channel. (It opens theatrically in New York this Friday, Oct. 15, and in Los Angeles on Oct. 22.) Some theaters may opt instead for Mini-Carlos -- which is also being made available via video on demand -- and although I recommend the full-strength version if you have the choice, neither Assayas' storytelling capabilities nor his knack for sharp characterization are compromised in the takeout-container portion. And either way, you get to watch Édgar Ramírez -- as the man who was born Ilich Ramirez Sànchez before his gradual transformation into the gun-loving, ideology-spouting, girl-chasing revolutionary Carlos -- in one of the most enjoyable performances of the year.
Carlos isn't exactly a portrait of a fun guy. In the movie's terms -- and the picture opens with a disclaimer reminding us that this is a fiction based on real-life characters and events -- Carlos is a tangle of contradictions and semi-contradictions. At any point in the course of this story, which opens in 1973 and covers a period of roughly 20 years, Carlos might be any combination of the following: A ruthless killer, a chauvinistic user, an affectionate father, a master manipulator, a sex god, a cocksure strategist, and even an insecure chubster. In the early sections of the story, Carlos -- still going by his given name, Ilich -- is still just a baby superterrorist, not yet ready to roll without his training wheels. A pro-Palestinian militant, he starts out by attempting (and failing) to assassinate a pro-Israeli London business magnate; then he skips off to Paris, where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) puts him in charge of this or that dangerous mission.
In the aftermath, he shoots three French domestic intelligence officers who have begun snooping around his why's and wherefore's. Then it's on to southern Yemen, where the head of the PFLP, Wadie Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), gives him the terror assignment of a lifetime: That of crashing an OPEC conference in Vienna (with the help of other Palestinian militants and leftists from German Revolutionary Cells), where he's to take a selection of hostages and off the Saudi oil minister, an operation that entails much running, shouting, and waving and firing of guns. The raid makes Carlos famous, even though it doesn't turn out as planned.
But that's just business as usual in the life of an international terrorist, and from there, Carlos allies himself with any scoundrel or rapscallaion (including Saddam Hussein) who pays him even a cockeyed compliment, as long as the money is right. From Iraq to Syria, Carlos makes "friends" wherever he goes. He lands, for a time, in Budapest and East Berlin, where he avails himself of any benefits the Iron Curtain might offer him. (He also finds a German-terrorist wife, a sharp and calculating little flirt played, in a fine-grained performance, by Nora von Waldstätten.) Then it's on to Sudan, where, after the disappointing (for him) fall of the Berlin Wall, he meets his ultimate betrayal.
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.