hyped garbage

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Excellent movie of what happens to you under a communistic system when it turns on you! Riveting, captivating true story of how high ranking leadership in the communist party are taking down by other higher ranking leaders and of course the system itself. The story doesn't waste much time in getting started so pay close attention as it takes off when you least expect it to. There will be flashbacks that come and go that may throw you off only slightly but if you listen and watch they are handled and put you on track for being taken prisoner yourself! That's right! The viewer is sucked in and kept there and as we watch the methods used in the USSR to break someone's power and will, we will be affected just by association. You have to remember its only a movie at times but real none the less. The lead actor does an excellent job as does the supporting players. Slowly, people who thought they were untouchable and above it all have their worlds shattered. Who can survive? How? That what awaits and more when you tune in here. I kept wondering when will all this subtle and highly sophisticated manipulation of people and facts will end and it doesn't disappoint you when we get there. Some people who had to travel into this system paid for the journey with their lives while others got to live to tell this story. Power corrupts, is an illusion and here you will learn is a form of control. This is where it becomes most effective. The people in this system obey it without question making you ask this question: Are they afraid they will be next? What happens is not a love driven dynamic as we watch it unfold. However we become very glad that we live in America. The USA is not perfect but keep me away from this system at all costs. Highly recommend a tasty drink and a sandwich which by the way is in this movie making you want one. Good sunflower seeds movie as well. Confess now or confess later but one thing is for sure. You will confess

Costa Gavras followed up his greatest critical and commercial success, "Z", with this initially confusing but ultimately illuminating political drama (which predates, and resembles more than a little, both "Papillon" and "Midnight Express"). Occasionally it can be just as exhausting for the viewer as it is for Yves Montand's character; Gavras reaches into a whole bag of cinematic tricks, but cannot quite camouflage the repetitive nature of the story; on the whole, however, "The Confession" is a powerful, sad, enraging experience. Although some viewers who still believe in the socialist ideals are bound to hate it for what it exposes, it's still the work of a genuine socialist who grieves over what became of Lenin's revolution in Stalin's (and his successors') hands. Or, as the young Czechs' graffiti on the wall in the final shot says, "Lenin, wake up! They've gone crazy". *** out of 4.

In "L'Aveau" Costa-Gavras breaks at once and for all in defending one political ideology and attacking the other, like he did in "Z". This time he goes to show that both sides have their problematic aspects, they all make severe mistakes, we can't know which was good and which was bad. The bottom of line is that both with capitalism and communism someone decent always had to pay the prize for trying to do the right thing.Yves Montand plays the victim once again (murdered in "Z" and arrested by militants in "Etat de Siege" closing the combative Gavras political trilogy, "Missing" goes as an addendum, made years later after those films), a Czech and Communist vice-minister who'll be arrested and suffer on the hands of other members of the party who consider him a traitor of their cause. They believe he was a spy who had connections with American officials and all they want is a full confession of his crimes, which never existed, never happened (and they know that!), using of mental and physical methods to achieve results with the prisoner. The confession extraction is the real purpose to be visualized in here, exploited in painful and realistic details, methods used by the Communist - I recalled some of the descriptions made by Soljenitsin in "Gulag Archipelag", released on the same year as "L'Aveau" - like privation of sleep, keep marching at all times inside of the cell, and many other horrible techniques they used on prisoners during months and years if possible in order to break their resistance and confess everything, real or not.We have to give plenty of credit to Montand during those scenes, which are not few. Definitely not an easy shooting to make, you feel his exhaustion, weakening each frame goes by, the visible weight-loss, he went to extremes very few actors can reach and no, this isn't much method acting, one does not go in training method for those scenes, he just put himself there at each sequence. It doesn't go well for the character and it sure does not go well with the audience. It's hard to watch since the brutality and the frequency everything happens is so repetitive as if Gavras was trying to make the people in the audience to break out from the movie when in fact he's just being real with the events, causing some stir in us to the point where we ask ourselves how come this guy is not guilty of treason. In this manifest against the totalitarianism, the writer and director seemed to not making of the Socialists the almost heroes they were in "Z", while investigating the assassination of the popular leader. Their destructive paranoia, the unsubstantial suspicion they had with their own members, it's all a smoke curtain to hide the flaws of bigger people working on the Party and to hide the failures of a deeply flawed and inconsistent regime. Authentic, honorable and well-acted in all possible ways, just not much easy to endure. But truthful, powerful, haunting and rewarding nonetheless. 9/10

Costa-Gavras makes a detour from his crusade against right-wing dictatorships to shoot a movie about the Soviet regime. And, in spite of the director's obvious leftist leanings, his critique of the communist totalitarian regimes is no less merciless in its brutal honesty.Yves Montand plays Anton Ludvik, the Czechoslovakian vice-minister of Foreign Affairs. He's a Party veteran, he fought with the Resistance against the Nazis in WWII, he has a comfortable house, he's a loyal and dedicated Party member.That's why he can't understand why the Party has him being followed and later arrested to confess crimes he didn't commit. This is the world of the Soviet Union, where up is down, friends quickly become foes, logic gives in to submission and reality is fabricated by the Party officers. If they wish a loyal member to be guilty, he'll be guilty. It doesn't matter if he understands the charges; confession, submission is everything.Costa-Gavras has made great fast-paced thrillers like Z and State of Siege. But The Confession is more like Special Section: it's a drama built around a brutal premise that is taken to its logical conclusions. The movie shows how the state, through torture, intimidation and appeals to loyalty can strip away a man of his sanity, dignity and defiance. Ludvik is slowly battered with endless interrogations and random torture to break his spirit, confuse him and get him to admit to whatever the Party wants. For their realism, the torture scenes are unparalleled, save perhaps by the ones in State of Siege. They're not the gore feasts fantasies of Eli Roth's movies, they're terrifying techniques probably still being used everywhere in the world wherever totalitarianism rules. It's their plausibility that makes them the more disturbing.The movie also has a very Kafkaesque atmosphere, in particular The Trial. Kafka was a man ahead of his time when he prophesied a tyrannizing, incomprehensible world in which Man is crushed by the wheels of a faceless bureaucracy. This movie depicts that world very well, as torturers and interrogators change but the Party's presence remains, inspiring both dread and loyalty, for no true member can imagine living outside the Party.This is another interesting aspects the movie explores, the dependence people have on the Party, their blind loyalty to it, and their belief in its infallibility. One of the characters' sentences describes this relation clearly: better be wrong and inside the Party, than right and out of it. It's their oxygen, their life, which only makes the accusations harder for Ludvik to understand.The movie is not as visually impressive as Z or State of Siege, but the filmmakers do some interesting things with the editing, going back and forth, flash-forwarding, breaking the narrative to show Ludvik's state of mind through dreams, crossing the movie with real footage of Stalin and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It doesn't surprise me that Oscar-winning Françoise Bonnot worked on the editing.The script is initially confusing, and the first ten minutes have so many characters moving in and out of the frame that it was hard to keep track of everyone. But once Ludvik is arrested, the movie becomes a lot more interesting. Jorge Semprún was Costa-Gavras greatest screenwriter and his understanding of the horrors of totalitarian regimes is unique in film history.Very much in line with the rest of the work Costa-Gavras was doing in the '60s and '70s, this is a powerful movie that shouldn't remain forgotten.