On occasion I will watch a movie in order to make me feel cool. Mean Streets might be one. Otto e Mezzo or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I used to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s to make me feel like a writer. I will watch the Sopranos to make me feel cool.
I sat down to watch Carlos when I was feeling less cool then ever. Some boys had just been picking on me because of the poor attempt at a moustache that was accumulating on my upper lip. I trudged home and illegally downloaded Carlos, the Olivier Assayas epic about Carlos the Jackal, to make me feel 5 hours cool.
Dissapointment and horror. A film which is soul destroyingly uncool. Carlos is to cool what the Khmer Rouge is to nice.
This is good and thoughtful work from Assayas, a movie which achieves a magnificent feat of deglamorisation. The violence and danger which Carlos the Jackal makes you think of is written off as posturing and pretention. The depiction of Carlos himself, played with effortlessness and sleaze by Edgar Ramirez is of one man too long on a gap year. His speeches and ponitifications ring false and narcissistic and irritating. What more needs to be said: The man wanted to be Che Guevara. Into his forties.
The movie tumbles along through all of Carlos' bunglings and comes to a cripplingly depressing halt with a moment of perfection and symmetry: Carlos gets botox. This revolutionary, this gigantic, terrifying piratical swashbuckler, gets botox. What a knob.
It felt like a subtler, cleverer, more bilious, more ruthless Spinal Tap.
Maybe I’m off kilter here. Maybe the movie is more forgiving, less clever than I am giving it credit for. Maybe Carlos just reminded me of a bellend I met at university. Who cares. I loved it.
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