Review: Circle of Deceit

The film’s rain-drenched finale ravishingly evokes the horror of being trapped in a situation with no apparent way out.

Circle of Deceit
Photo: Kino International

Volker Schlöndorff’s humanist Circle of Deceit charts the many moral quandaries faced by journalist Georg Laschen (Bruno Ganz) when he’s sent to Beirut to catalog the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war. Viciously absorbed into the unpredictable chaos that erupts around him, Georg comes to question his subjective approach to the war while trying to put an end to his devastated relationship with his wife (Gila von Weitershausen) back home and negotiate the parasitic journalists who soullessly trade in images of the dead.

Not unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Pioneers in Ingolstadt, which also starred Hanna Schygulla, Circle of Deceit is troublesomely hung up on a metaphoric love-is-war dialectic that works for Schlöndorff more than it did for Fassbinder because the approach here is considerably more folkloric. Maurice Jarr’s sinister, almost childlike score is a work of subversive genius that exaggerates the rampant cynicism and hypocrisy the film simultaneously embodies and parades throughout its 108 minutes.

“A very good photographer. He only sees what he sees. He leaves the doubting to me,” says Georg of his photographer friend, Hoffmann (Jerzy Skolimowski), a man so unmoved by even the most gruesome deaths that he will only record it if it coddles his predetermined notions of aesthetic truth. However glib Georg’s marital problems are in comparison to the horrors he experiences, Schlöndorff is valiantly fixated on the logic of wars—that is, their unexplained beginnings and uncertain endings. A Hollywood production would have freed Georg by story’s end; here, he returns to his wife more confused than ever. The film’s rain-drenched finale ravishingly evokes the horror of being trapped in a situation with no apparent way out.

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Score: 
 Cast: Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla, Jean Carmet, Jerzy Skolimowski, Gila von Weitershausen, Peter Martin Urtel, John Munro  Director: Volker Schlöndorff  Screenwriter: Jean-Claude Carrière, Kai Hermann, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta  Distributor: Kino International  Running Time: 108 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1981  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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