The Confession

The film Costa-Gavras made after Z, aimed this time not at right-wing dictatorships but at the Eastern Bloc. Gérard is a senior official in the communist party. One day he is followed, then arrested, and the charge is unclear. The interrogation runs for months: sleeplessness, starvation, being kept standing for hours, the same questions asked thousands of times. What is wanted is not information but a confession. In the end he memorises a text describing things he never did and reads it out in court. The source is Artur London's memoir. London really was tried in the Czechoslovak proceedings of 1952, escaped the death sentence and wrote down what happened. The film's political weight comes from its cast as well. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret were among the best-known figures of the French left, and the film was received as a criticism aimed at the left from within rather than from outside. Montand lost a great deal of weight for the part. The narrative takes place almost entirely indoors, in the cell and the interrogation room. One of the important examples of its kind for anyone who likes political cinema and narratives drawn from record. A warning about difficult scenes: the film shows psychological pressure through repetition, and that repetition is deliberately exhausting.