Plenty of Nada

By R.S.

THE NADA GANG

Directed by CLAUDE CHABROL Screenplay by CLAUDE CHABROL and JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE

Claude Chabrol defines absurdity as the gap between the awesome finality of death and the trivial reasons men adduce for killing or putting themselves in the way of being killed. To him, murder is the ultimate emotional excess, an enigma he has worried with a tough-minded, ironic and often subtle compassion in such recent films as This Man Must Die and Le Boucher. These movies are about the exorcizing of private demons. Never until The Nada Gang has Chabrol concerned himself with murder in its most absurd manifestation--as an act of public political protest.

It would seem to be a perfect subject for him. What is more ridiculous than taking a single life as a way of making a statement about a vast political or social issue? What is more cruel than making an individual, against his will, into a symbol of injustices for which he bears little, if any, personal responsibility and which may even be largely the figments of his assassins' imaginations? The Nada Gang, in short, had the potential for being Chabrol's great summing up. It is instead a botch.

Specifically, the film is concerned with an anarchist group that kidnaps (from a whorehouse) the American Ambassador to France, holds him for ransom on an isolated farm while threatening to kill him if their demands are not met by the government. Eventually he and his captors all die in a police action that looks like a rescue operation but is planned from the start by its leader (Michel Aumont) as a massacre. Throughout, Chabrol scores the kind of points one expects from him. Most of the Nada gang are working out their personal problems through political activity. The same may be said of their official pursuers up to the highest level of the French government, whose ministers and bureaucrats are as blandly indifferent to humane concerns as the anarchists. There are some good performances by Fabio Testi as the most frantic of this Gallic wild bunch, Maurice Garrel as its weariest old soldier and by Mariangela Melato as its only feminist. As usual, Chabrol directs with admirable technical dexterity.

Tipped Scales. Yet somehow the film never really involves the viewer. Obviously the director started out to be evenhanded, to show how any system that drains the human factor out of its political processes breeds an answering cold-bloodedness in its most radical opponents. At some point, however, he must have realized that such an approach left the audience with no one to care about emotionally. So he tips the scales in favor of the anarchists by sympathetically particularizing them a little more than he does the representatives of the state. But he does not go far enough in this direction to make any real difference. All he really accomplishes is the corruption of the point that he started out to make. As a result, The Nada Gang turns out to be just another picturesque cinematic bloodbath. -R. S.

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