No lawyer jokes, please: Terror’s Advocate on DVD

Having made an up-too-close-for-comfort and way-too-personal documentary back in 1974 on the horror known as Idi Amin Dada, Barbet Schroeder turns his camera on a different kind of monster, French lawyer Jacques Vergès, in Terror’s Advocate. Friend of Pol Pot and Carlos the Jackal, Vergès is internationally infamous for defending such notable villains as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Does this man -— onscreen for much of the film fussing over a cigar, gloating with a smirk about his audacious tactics and victories — really merit a 140-minute film? Yes, because — you guessed it — he turns out to be far more complex than a glance at his resume would indicate.

The son of a French diplomat and Vietnamese woman, the precociously bright and gifted young Vergès stumbled almost by accident into practicing law. Early in his career he finds himself defending Algerian resistance fighter and café bomber Djamila Bouhired, sentenced to death before Vergès labors to stay her execution and have her freed, in part by rallying an influential international community behind her cause. He later marries and fathers two children with her before mysteriously disappearing for eight years. Upon his return to Paris, Vergès picks up his law practice, defending high-profile (and wealthy) terrorists. His 1984 defense of Nazi lieutenant Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” was a notorious and dubious high point in his career.

The complexity enters when Vergès, associates and friends (the film is largely comprised of talking heads, or at least heads and torsos) explain his reasoning for taking these cases — he despises colonialism and wants to hold Western governments accountable for their crimes in Asian, African and South American countries. By defending terrorists and dictators, he seeks to call into question the crimes perpetrated by European countries and the United States, which in many cases murder, torture and deny civil rights on a whim after occupying other countries.

This is an interesting argument in the abstract, but the theory doesn’t translate well when considering the case of someone like Milosevic. Likewise, Vergès’ justification of his defense of Barbie — French practices in Algeria were similar to Nazi crimes — seems a nauseating academic exercise.

That seems to be Schroeder’s opinion as well, and he makes clear in the beginning that Terror’s Advocate is merely his subjective look at Vergès. The film is actually more clear-headed and even-handed than most would feel the attorney deserves, though it in no way strives to exonerate him. What it does accomplish is to make us consider colonialism, terrorism, the legal system and the idea that everyone is entitled to the best defense possible, reminding us that the best defense is generally the most expensive, silver-tongued devil. As one of Vergès friends explains after he asks the lawyer how he could defend Barbie: “He converted me because he’s pretty smart,” showing the kind of sentiment that makes lawyer jokes seem fatuous, if not barbaric.