Throughout the West, millions of people have formed their opinion of the military regime in Greece by viewing the French-Algerian film Z, the title of which is the Greek symbol for "he still lives." A powerfully contrived and brilliantly acted thriller (TIME, Dec. 5), Z purports to give a picture of contemporary Greece by focusing on a right-wing conspiracy to kill a leftist politician. At the bottom of this plot are revealed all the elements that are bound to rouse the liberal Western conscience: self-righteous military men, violence-loving fascists and broad hints of American complicity.
To what extent is Z an accurate portrayal of affairs in Greece? According to its director, Greek Exile Constantin Costa-Gavras, it is based throughout on "real facts." Up to a point, he is right. The movie faithfully re-creates an incident in 1963 when a leading left-wing deputy, Grigorios Lambrakis, was struck and killed by a pickup truck after addressing a rally in Salonica. As in the film, the death was first labeled an accident, but a tenacious prosecutor gathered enough evidence to show two right-wing thugs had been hired by police to commit the deed. At the subsequent trial, the murderers received light jail sentences. The six indicted police were acquitted though they were dismissed from the force.
Compressed History. Where Z departs from the facts is in its implication that the present junta led by Colonel George Papadopoulos was involved in the right-wing plot. By a convenient compression of history, Z strongly suggests that the junta engineered the assassination, then used the ensuing disorders as a pretext to seize power. The assassination actually occurred four years before the colonels came to power, and there is no known evidence linking them with it. The episode, in fact, had quite different results. It helped topple the conservative regime of Constantine Karamanlis, which was then replaced by the left-centrist regime of George Papandreou, who was an enemy of the hard-line Greek military. As the reviewer for Manhattan's Village Voice put it, Z's plot is "much as if an American film maker had attempted to establish a direct link between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the accession of Spiro Agnew."
Director Costa-Gavras, moreover, takes sides unashamedly. The film fails completely to make the valid historical point that the Greek left should bear a share of the guilt for the public violence and the breakdown of democratic politics in Greece.
The Greek conservatives are portrayed as unredeemable goons with a tendency toward sadism and homosexuality. "What is false is the lack of differentiation," complains Helen Vlachos, a former Athens publisher who was placed under house arrest by the junta and later fled the country. "They are all ridiculous in the same way, all brutal in the same way."
In Z, the rightists kill off all the witnesses to the murder. In reality, none was killed (though one was badly beaten), and all showed up at the trial. By assorted hints, the leftists indicate that the U.S. is backing the military in order to protect its bases in Greece. As one anti-American remarks: "Always blame the U.S. Even when you're wrong, you're right."