‘Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie’ By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer January 27, 1989

Director: Marcel Ophuls Not rated Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

Throughout the film, we're shown photos of this man, known as "the butcher of Lyons" for the crimes he committed as Nazi Gestapo chief from 1942 to 1944, but they barely register. This is because the images of him we've made for ourselves are more vivid than the ones we're shown. And this withholding isn't accidental. Ophuls has kept him from us intentionally, knowing that the monster we imagine is more formidable than the man himself. And so when Barbie is finally brought before the camera, in a brief interview, we're almost mythically underwhelmed. Watching him, we can't believe that reality has been so poorly cast.

This is only one of the insoluble ironies elucidated in this profound and profoundly irritating documentary. Few stories are built to such gigantic proportions or have such vast and thorny implications. And rather than narrow his focus, Ophuls has expanded it to speculate on the broader themes -- the nature and causes of evil; the tension between justice and the law; the distinctions between moral and immoral actions during wartime. He also returns to the same ground he trod in "The Sorrow and the Pity," his masterly 1970 exploration of the themes of resistance and collaboration in France during the German occupation.

But "Hotel Terminus" isn't anywhere near the same level of achievement. In fact, it's hard to imagine a story less well served by its teller. Even though this is familiar territory for the Frankfurt-born director, he seems completely unable to structure his material in a way that makes it comprehensible.

Though Barbie is the movie's phantom center, Ophuls shares the stage with his subject, playing the wry but committed inquisitor, questioning his witnesses, both willing and unwilling, across desks, in living rooms and stairwells. By this method, Ophuls encourages his subjects to divulge their pain, and from this he constructs a history that is as much emotional as it is factual.

His technique is to build his narrative through an accretion of overlapping testimony. The process took Ophuls and his crew to five countries where they compiled 120 hours of interviews, which were subsequently combined with newsreel footage and edited down to a final length of nearly 4 1/2 hours.

But length is not the problem here; the problem is organization. For long periods of time, we're lost in a maze of side roads and digressions. Early in the picture we're led into a lengthy examination of the importance of the Resistance hero Jean Moul 'n, who was tortured at Barbie's Gestapo headquarters in Lyons, known as Hotel Terminus. But Ophuls never bothers to establish who Moul 'n is, and nearly half an hour passes before it's clear why he has been singled out from among all of Barbie's other victims. And when we're finally told that the Moul 'n case "made Barbie," that before that he was just "an ordinary torturer," we're still not sure what is meant. If this is history, it's history for experts.

In the beginning, Ophuls' dawdling and lack of discrimination -- he seems not to know his good interviewees from his bad ones -- nearly kills your interest. Later, the involvement of the American Intelligence Corps, which employed Barbie as a source of military information and aided in his escape from prosecution to South America, where he lived under an assumed named until 1983, galvanizes the director's energies, and the pace of the story quickens.

The section dealing with Barbie's exploits in South America is the most damaging to his just-following-orders defense. After his escape from France, Barbie picked up where he left off during the war, working first for the Bolivian government in charge of a paramilitary squad "organizing repressive forces in the country," and later doing much the same in Peru. Ophuls doesn't determine whether Barbie was merely "committed to an ideal" or a sadist. He leaves the possibility that both or either could be true. His indictment, in this case, is aimed not only at Barbie but at the governments -- the French and the American -- that either directly assisted Barbie in his escape or turned a deaf ear to those who would have had him returned to France and to justice.

When this finally occurs and Barbie is smuggled out of La Paz in a cargo plane, Ophuls once again gets tripped up in the tangle of detail and moral ambiguity. The one figure who emerges to help provide some unity is Jacques Verge`s, the attorney in charge of Barbie's defense in Lyons. Verge`s conveys an almost Shakespearean pridefulness and self-confidence. Puffing on his Cuban cigars, he looks like a pampered Eurasian princeling set down among the vulgarians. And when he's onscreen, making his arguments against the legitimacy of the state's case -- you feel that, at last, a character built to the scale of the events has emerged.

The trial itself, especially the moral issues raised by Verge`s' defense, doesn't seem to be of great interest to the director. And important details -- such as the fact that after three days Barbie walked out of his trial in protest, making only periodic appearances from then on -- are curiously overlooked.

Barbie's final appearance on film, though, is haunting. In footage shot aboard the cargo plane carrying him back to trial, he seems shrunken (he is said to have suffered a mild stroke only a month before), and the graininess of the shots makes his image look ghostly, insubstantial. Whatever was done was done a long time ago, he tells his interviewer in a voice whipped clean of emotion. "I've forgotten about it," he says. "If they haven't, that's their concern." In saying these words, Barbie seems to be trying to make himself vanish from sight and from history. Ophuls' film is an attempt to hold on to him, to retrieve him from forgetfulness. The light Ophuls shines on his subject isn't as bright as it might be, but it fixes him forever in our minds. Though the film itself may not excel, its effect is significant.

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