Documentary focuses on lawyer/provocateur Jacques Vergès

You know you're in for something when the first two people in a movie are Cambodian mass-murderer Pol Pot and his lawyer. But Jacques Vergès had defended a lot of people - from Algerian resistance fighters to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie - and it's his Zelig-like journey through the politics of the postwar 20th century that is the contentious subject of Barbet Schroeder's unwieldy, unforgettable film.

"When their ancestors were eating acorns in the forest," Vergès says of the French who filled the Barbie courtroom, "mine were building palaces." Vergès' mother was Vietnamese and his father was from Reunion Island, two sites with French histories. But Vergès, as Schroeder so ably shows, knows no nationality besides provocateur and die-hard Communist.

He fought under Charles de Gaulle during World War II but defended - and later married - Algerian "Milk Bar" bomber Djamila Bouhired during the Battle of Algiers.

He is a fierce advocate for the underdog but has numbered among his associates the celebrated assassin Carlos the Jackal and Swiss Nazi Francois Genoud. He professes a willingness to use any device to free a client, yet radiates integrity.

Audiences are going to want more judgment on Schroeder's part than they get; that Vergès is interviewed on a witness stand with a microphone in front of him is as overt as matters get.

Our sense is that Schroeder greatly admires Vergès, despite his subject's occasional opaqueness. A virtual parade of experts, friends and terrorists march through "Advocate," most of them testifying to Vergès' ethics and human qualities; Carlos' children called him "Uncle Jacques," the killer says from prison.

But the real accomplishment in "Terror's Advocate" is Schroeder's construction - a series of thorough, seemingly digressive passages about various cases of political intrigue, all of which eventually lead back to Vergès.

It's not a tidy movie by any stretch, but epics are seldom orderly.

Of course, one could argue that with a story as good as Vergès' it would be an accomplishment to screw things up. *

In English and French with English subtitles. Documentary produced by Rita Dagher, directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Prosper Keating, music by Jorge Arrigiada, distributed by Magnolia Pictures.