Costa Gavras (left) receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from Indian director Shyam Benegal during the 15th Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI) in Mumbai last week.

By Gautaman Bhaskaran


On a balmy summer’s evening in Paris many years ago, I came across a legend named Costa Gavras. It was not easy, not difficult either, to recognise him as he browsed through the leaves of a book in one of those quaint shops on Boulevard Saint Michel, a few steps away from Sorbonne.
I walked up to him, flashed a smile and said hello. He greeted me back in the friendliest manner possible.  But as he was in a hurry to leave, there was not much time to go beyond pleasantries. But, well, I had met in flesh and blood no less a luminary than Gavras, and I was superbly happy when I could meet him again, all over again, in Mumbai last week.
A few hours before the ongoing Mumbai Film Festival was to confer a Lifetime Achievement Award on him, I met Gavras at the Konkan Restaurant in Taj President. He had aged a little since my last meeting in Paris, but at 80, he still looked young for his age and had the mischievous twinkle in his eye.
I suppose that is what cinema does to people. The magic of movies infuses the youthful freshness in you. Yes, he admitted. But films also do more.  “It is the window to the world. You can see places, people, beautiful people, women,” he winked at me. He was charming all right in a marvellously boyish way.
But for Gavras, life did not begin easy. Born in Greece, he went to Paris in 1954. When he landed in Gare de Lyon that cold, grey morning, it was difficult. He did not speak French, and the people around him looked at him in a strange sort of way.  “It was very hard the first year. But then I made friends, girlfriends who taught me French, and I found work, like cleaning cars. I sailed along,” Gavras reminisces about times long gone by.
In the end, hardship mattered little. For, Paris afforded a brand new world of artistic liberty and personal freedom, a great escape from Greece’s authoritarian regime. Also, “I came from a poor family, and I could not study in Greece. But in France university was free. It still is. Students could get reasonably inexpensive lodgings. Work was available. I survived by doing odd jobs in the evenings or at weekends”, Gavras paints his autobiographical sketch, playing with the glass of water on the table.
“What was most, most important for me was the freedom I enjoyed. I could read any newspaper. I could read any book. There was also another attraction in Paris. The Louvre. It was a kind of fairy-taleplace for me, where I could discover places, Egypt, India and so on, through the artefacts there in the museum. I literally saw the world through the corridors of the museum.”
Today, nearly six decades after his bewildering first day in Paris, Gavras is one of the most celebrated directors the world has ever known, indeed one of the most feted in France, a man whom the nation loves to call its very own.
With over 20 movies behind him, Gavras took his first nervous steps in quite the right direction. He studied at Sorbonne in the 1950s, an association he does not want to let go. For he still lives close to the renowned university in the Latin Quarter. A naturalised French citizen, he was knighted by France, and in 2007 was elected president of Cinematheque Francaise.
He was born Konstantinos Gavras in 1933 in a tiny village in the Peloponnese, Greece. His father was a left-wing activist who fought royalty during the Nazi movement. But after the war, with the defeat of the Communists, the man lost his job as a tax official and was jailed. While the family suffered in poverty, Gavras had to face obstacles as well. He was not allowed to join a university in Greece, and was refused a visa to study in an American film school. He was in every conceivable way a victim of the Cold War.
But these political events not only drove Gavras to France but also invoked in him a strong political sense that we see in his cinema. Joining a movie school in Paris, he grew up under the influence of men like Truffaut and Godard, and though the French New Wave fascinated him, he found it difficult to make films that were “interiorised and intimate” — a style adopted by the French auteurs.
Gavras’ second movie (his first was a detective thriller, The Sleeping Car Murders in 1965), Shock Troops (1967), crystallised his commitment to political cinema. He once quipped: “My mother used to stay away from politics, and she asked me to do the same, because my father went to prison. But if you reject politics, you reject a lot of relationships. The worst thing in society is individualism.”
Soon after, Vassilis Vassilikos’ novel, Z, came by – about the 1963 murder of  a Greek Member of Parliament and takeover of power by the military – Gavras turned that into a gripping screenplay (along with Spanish writer Jorge Semprun) and film. Z was shot in Algeria, and ended with a list of things that the Greek colonels had banned.
More importantly, Z began with a curious disclaimer which we would find it shocking. It said: “Any similarity to persons or events is deliberate.” Released in 1969 on the heels of the 1968 students’ and workers’ protests in France and elsewhere, Z was a roaring success. A powerful satire on Greek politics, it was dark, it was witty, and it brilliantly caught the outrage of the military dictatorship in Greece then.
Gavras’ 1970 The Confessions firmly affirmed his political stamp on cinema. About a Czech Communist, Artur London, forced to make a false confession in Stalinist times, the movie was a telling commentary on the seamy side of public life. Gavras averred that his generation of Greeks in the 1940s “probably thought Communism was a solution. But, at least in Eastern Europe, it was a dictatorial system with no respect for human beings except the party leaders.”
His 1972 ‘State of Siege’ narrating the gruesome story of the murder of an American official by Uruguayan guerrillas completed the political trilogy. Shot in Allende’s Chile, before he was killed in the Pinochet coup, ‘State of Siege’ underlined Gavras’ view on the slain Marxist leader.
Gavras called Allende a “naive but deeply honest politician. I knew he couldn’t succeed. When you saw people occupying factories and estates, I thought, if they don’t stop this, it will be a tragedy. I was hoping it wouldn’t happen.”
By now it was more than clear that Gavras was determined to tell political stories, and so strong was his resolve that he even got Jack Lemmon to do Missing – an engaging work about Charles Horman, an American journalist who disappeared in the aftermath of a US-backed coup in Chile in 1973 that also deposed Allende.
Missing was made in Hollywood, and everybody wondered why Gavras had picked Lemmon. He was a comedian, they were puzzled. But Missing did not miss the eye of the Cannes jury in 1982 where the picture won the Palm d’Or, and Lemmon walked away with the best actor trophy. That year, it also got several Oscar nods, including ones for best film and best actor.
Two of his most recent movies – Mad City (1997) and Ax (2005) – are riveting portrayals of men who snap under the pressure of job loss and the current economic crisis.  In a way, these were also covertly political.
The Capital, which he helmed last year, is an engaging piece of work about American dominance and cunning to wrest control of a French bank. A pulsating boardroom show, The Capital’s protagonist is the bank’s CEO, who is young but remarkably wily, beating the Americans at their own game.
In the final analysis, the work is a deep study of how capitalism robs the poor to pay the rich — a kind of reverse Robin Hood in business suit whose battlefield is the financial centres of the world like Paris, New York, London and Tokyo.
As Gavras remarked, every film is political, even those that show men with guns in exciting chases. In The Capital, they hunt not with pistols but with pounds.

* Gautaman Bhaskaran is now covering the Mumbai Film Festival, and may be emailed at gautamanb@hotmail.com