Verges is in love with his own hate. He sees hypocrisy everywhere and like a spoiled brat wants to tear everything done. And so he supports dictators and mass murderers in the the name of justice.He also asserts that the Cambodian genocide under his friend Pol Pot did not happen and blames the Americans for most of the damage.The fact that over one quarter of Cambodia's population perished under Pol Pot's rule - the fact that Pol Pot's insane policies drove the population to utter starvation - the fact that Pol Pot's regime actively conducted mass imprisonment, torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of its own people - including children - does not bother Verges who still admires Pol Pot.This film does not press Verges on such hard questions. Its an utter waste of time and only serves as a limelight for his overwhelming ego.

After having seen Schroeder's Idi Amin and Kiki the talking gorilla, I was disappointed by L'avocat. From an artistic point of view it is not on the same level. I found it difficult to recognize the organizing, guiding hand of the director. Also, the subject is strangely out of focus – but that is maybe just one of the points the movie wants to make. Maître Vergès must be a pretty elusive fellow and certainly not someone who let himself manipulate by a movie maker. And - contrary to Amin and the gorilla - Vergès is just not very telegenic. That's certainly nobody's fault, it's just a fact.What remains for me are the many „bonmots" this movie contains. It did not become clear to me if Vergès ever was a good lawyer. I suspect he always saw the court of law principally as a stage for making political statements or for furthering a certain self image. But he certainly is a great story teller. „My only war wound", he tells the interviewer, „was self inflicted – I cut a finger when I closed my pocket knife after eating a dish of oysters". „Mao listened to me attentively – or maybe he just wanted to be polite." It is fun to listen to him telling these anecdotes and being disrespectful, even to himself. Many, maybe too many other people make their entrance as interviewees. Even for someone who has a notion of the last few decades of world history it is not always easy to follow.Saying all this, I have to credit the movie for forming a pattern of statements, places and time periods that recount events which brought a lot of pain and sorrow to this planet. The central question - is Maître Vergès a man with a cause? - remains unanswered. Somehow he shifted from one „liberation movement" to the next, maybe connected to secret services, maybe not - his aims apparently as fuzzy as those of the said movements - never drowning like others but always ending up seemingly comfortably on the surface. It is never clear how much Vergès was a prime mover on the terrorist scene or a teleguided pawn. After seeing this movie I would liken him to a joker in a pack of cards.Someone not very deep into history might be surprised at how L'avocat shows that there were always connections and sympathies between old, active Nazis and young, seemingly leftist revolutionaries. Others know the old French saying: Les extrèmes se touchent.

This really hadn't any beginning, middle or end. It simply was a long conversation with various persons and Jaques Verges, the advocate of terror.The idea is an intriguing one, that of a lawyer who defends the reprehensible because he believes in due-process and the law more than abstract ideas like morality and goodness.But this isn't what it was, because Verges never believed his clients lacking in morality or goodness. He represented these clients because politically he felt he had to.It'd been more interesting (I think) to understand the psyche of a lawyer who represents clients he himself (or she herself) detests and holds no political allegiance to.The runtime is a bloated two-hours and seventeen minutes, and in that time holds very little focus. It's very interesting subject-matter, but it's presented in such a wandering manner that leaves us bored. Only two or three trials are explicitly discussed and played out for the viewers. The rest of this film is Verges political tendencies and how they have got him in hot water with the French government.

In the movies lawyers have often been depicted as honest guys who try to do their best to defend their client, but also as vicious fellas who do the job just for money or fame, even if that implies having dangerous clients (the culmination of such a concept was Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate). And somewhere in between we can put Jacques Vergès, the French attorney around whom Barbet Schroeder has constructed his new film, the documentary Terror's Advocate.The title derives from the case that made Vergès famous at the beginning of his career: he was asked to defend a group of terrorists, responsible for a series of killings in Algeria. Of course, these men and women claimed to be freedom fighters, that what they did was the right thing to do. Vergès shared their ideals, managed to get them all out of jail and even married one of them. Subsequently he was always hired for controversial cases, and always ended up winning, even when his clients were former Nazis or Holocaust deniers.The point of the movie is this: what should people think of Vergès? In fact, the opening caption says: "This film represents the director's personal point of view on Jacques Vergès", yet ironically Schroeder's opinion is not clear. While he seems to agree with the titular lawyer in the first half, saying that the Algerian terrorists had good intentions but used the wrong means (and it is hard not to think likewise, especially after seeing Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, based on those events), he does not directly express his feelings on Vergès' supposed ties with numerous German terrorists, some of which were involved in the 1972 Olympic Games massacre in Munich.As a consequence, the ambiguous attorney never really comes off as either good or bad: he does seem to have some kind of moral standards (when asked if he would have defended Hitler, he answers: "I'd even defend Bush, but he would have to plead guilty") and claims he has just been doing his job the whole time, but he refuses to comment on his alleged connections with German criminals, spreading no further light on the matter, nor does he reveal exactly what happened during his 12-year "disappearance", which he apparently spent in Paris for purposes unknown.Nonetheless, it shows that Vergès has two essential qualities for a good lawyer: charisma and eloquence. And he knowingly uses those tools while being interviewed, providing valuable insight on a previously unseen side of the legal system and making Terror's Advocate an intriguing picture, although clearly not to everyone's taste.