Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France