Betrayed

Costa-Gavras is  a highly regarded political film-maker, known for his  iconic anti-Establishmentarian films, Z (1968) and State of Seige (1973). He is best known to English-language audience for his commendable 1982 film Missing.  Here he teams with writer Joe Eszterhas,who would become notorious as the writer of  mainstream sexploitational movies Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) but who at this time had had only a reasonable-sized hit with Jagged Edge  (1985) a story about a female lawyer who falls in love with the man she is defending for murdering his wife.  It’s an unlikely alliance and the result is more writer than director in a fancifully-plotted thriller about a female FBI agent who falls in love with a man she is investigating for murder.

Debra Winger is the undercover agent, Cathy, posing (completely unconvincingly) as an itinerant farm laborer operating a combine harvester on the Iowa farm of Gary (Tom Berenger) a Vietnam vet and widowed father with two children. Before you can say “Klu Klux Klan” Cathy is, in the film’s most tasteless scene, accompanying Gary and his redneck mates on a “nigga” hunt through the woods. Lest you think this unlikely, Eszterhas has Gary explain to Cathy (or Katie. as he thinks she is) in New Age speak. that he wants to be “open”  with her about himself and share with her what is important to him.  If this assertion is little short of ridiculous, even less convincing is Cathy’s continuing with the charade despite being a nervous wreck (she is supposed to be a trained FBI agent but her lack of covert skills such as calling her minder, played by John Heard, from Gary’s downstairs phone is breathtaking). With Jagged Edge a similar dilemma had some degree of credibility but here there is none

That the film ends with an assassination and the suggestion of right-wing conspiracy in high places is as close as Costa-Gavras gets to his glory days in a film that simply uses such material as a means to ring the changes on a well-worn formula. 

 

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