'Carlos' DVD Review

The five-and-a-half-hour version of Carlos aired on Sundance Channel in 2010 and won the 2011 Golden Globe for Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. Also, versions of Carlos, usually shorter, have shown in theaters. But the version being discussed here, released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection, is the full-length one broadcast on Sundance.

The miniseries is a docudrama or biopic about the international terrorist dubbed Carlos the Jackal by the press. There is plenty of shooting, bombing and hostage-taking, and director Olivier Assayas does a brilliant job of keeping the tension high for almost the entirety of the lengthy running time. The real-life Carlos was also something of a bon vivant and womanizer, so the filmmakers spice things up with some sex and nudity, including the title character admiring himself stark naked in front of a mirror. Location shooting ranged over a variety of interesting places, including France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco and Sudan. The miniseries stars Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez in the title role, and he turns in an unforgettable performance.

Although Carlos is a French production, English is spoken most of the time. But this is a polyglot world, and also heard are French, Spanish, Arabic, German, Hungarian, Russian and Japanese.

The music on the soundtrack is mostly preexisting post-punk, including groups like Wire, The Feelies and New Order. But over the closing credits is heard the highly appropriate "La Pistola y El Corazón" by Los Lobos.

Carlos takes place from 1973 to 1994, during which time the title character goes from ages 23 to 44. Lead actor Édgar Ramírez packed on 35 pounds to reflect how the real-life Carlos put on weight as he aged.

In the early years, Carlos worked for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and he took part in missions intended to advance the cause of Palestinian statehood. Examples include an attempt to assassinate a wealthy British Zionist and businessman, as well as tossing a grenade into a crowded drugstore-café in Paris in support of the Japanese Red Army, who had gunned down people at Tel Aviv airport. In his best-known operation, he led a team of terrorists in taking dozens of hostages, including the Saudi oil minister, at a 1975 OPEC meeting in Vienna.

But the backdrop here is the Cold War, and it's important to understand that the Venezuelan-born Carlos espouses Marxist ideas, and the PFLP is secular and socialist. Most of the funding for the terrorist missions comes from Arab dictatorships — Syria, Libya, Iraq — while there's protection from Soviet satellite states, such as East Germany and Hungary. It's the shifting winds of politics that eventually bring Carlos down.

Meanwhile, Carlos seemed to always find time for women, and he's shown with a number of girlfriends, one of whom he legally marries, and they have a child together. Later, he and his wife separate, and he takes a second wife in the Muslim tradition. Also, Carlos uses the services of prostitutes.

The Carlos DVD set consists of four discs that provide nearly five hours of supplementary video materials.

Since the feature here is a somewhat fictionalized dramatization, it's helpful that the DVD set contains over three hours of extras dealing with much of the same subject matter using a straight documentary approach. The 58-minute "Carlos: Terrorist Without Borders" is a 1997 French TV documentary that traces Carlos' career via news footage and old photos, as well as interviews with various people. The 38-minute "Hans-Joachim Klein" is a 1995 German-language interview with the terrorist known as Angie, who was seriously wounded during the OPEC hostage-taking. Also, there's the 88-minute 2004 German-language documentary "Maison de France," centering on the 1983 bombing of a French cultural center in West Berlin. In this extra, you can see Carlos' first wife, Magdalena Kopp, as well Isabelle Coutant Peyre, the Parisian lawyer he went through a Muslim wedding ceremony with in 2001.

The remaining extras are about the making of the miniseries Carlos. There's a 43-minute interview with director Olivier Assayas, a 20-minute interview with lead actor Édgar Ramírez and a 13-minute interview with cinematographer Denis Lenoir. All three interviews are in English. Also, Lenoir supplies nine minutes of voice-over commentary on six scenes he shot. Finally, there's the 20-minute French-language making-of documentary "Shooting the OPEC Sequence."

The Criterion Collection packages a 40-page booklet with the four discs comprising the Carlos DVD set. The booklet contains a pair of scholarly articles about the miniseries, one by academic Colin MacCabe, the other by critic Greil Marcus. Also, Stephen Smith, the historical adviser on Carlos, provides short biographies of seven of the real-life people who are depicted in a quasi-fictional way in the miniseries. In addition, Smith supplies a timeline of events in Carlos' life, from his birth in 1949 as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez — Carlos was a nom de guerre — to his 1997 sentencing to life imprisonment for murder.

DVD Release Date: September 27, 2011
Number of DVDs: 4
Feature Content: 3 Episodes (Total Runtime = 5 hr. 40 min.)
Supplementary Materials: 9 Video Extras (Total Runtime = 4 hr. 53 min.)
MPAA Rating: Not Rated