Nada

"The short but full story of the Nada gang." It moves with splenetic rapidity, as befits a lampoon of Costa-Gavras' State of Siege, a cross-section of ragtag "desperadoes." The bearded firebrand in leather jacket and Zorro sombrero (Fabio Testi), the impotent globe-trotter (Maurice Garrel) and the philosophy teacher (Michel Duchaussoy), gauchistes scrambling to carry the Sixties torch into the new decade. The American ambassador in the deluxe brothel is their target, disillusionment and alcoholism and myopic zeal promptly poke through the half-baked scheme. A bother for the Minister of the Interior (André Falcon), for the clownish police commissioner (Michel Aumont) a sadistic spree. Terrorism on opposite sides, "two jaws of the same idiotic trap." Is Claude Chabrol guilty of, as one character puts it, no longer believing in the revolution and acting out of despair? Upheaval in romanticized ideals and bumbling reality, a manifesto more effective as red graffiti ("Rich man, your Paris is surrounded. We'll burn it") than as actual change. The State meanwhile sticks to its own official story, telling its assassins to take no prisoners and then scapegoating them. Schopenhauer's solipsist madman, Le Rouge et le Noir in the suspect's closet ("An anarchist pamphlet," obviously), Cuba Sí. "No theoretical discussions!" Refuge in the bunny farm alongside the machine gun-toting pixie (Mariangela Melato), Penn's Bonnie and Clyde for the bloody raid. Mutual destruction at the end of the line, cat and weasel blowing each other away as a high-angled panning shot surveys the carnage and the anguish behind Chabrol's satire. "A good civil war is worth more than a rotten peace." With Lou Castel, Didier Kaminka, François Perrot, Lyle Joyce, Henri Attal, and Viviane Romance.