I'll simply start off by saying that Terror's Advocate (L'Avocat de la terreur) isn't so much as fascinating or intriguing as I had heard and read. Quite frankly, I found it a somewhat boring. First and foremost there's next to zero courtroom action involving the litany of despots, tyrants, terrorists, and dictatorial murderers one Jacques Verges, defense attorney to the indefensible.
Whether he insisted on, or was chosen to, represent. this caliber of client is debatable, he began his career like many "freedom fighting" militants, slashing and burning, plotting and sneak attacking, striking when it's convenient for him — all of this culminated in a marriage to an Algerian terrorist (self-described) soon after the country's independence from France. At the time the upwardly mobile, now attorney, settled for clientele consisting of low-rent petty criminals and thugs, but combined with this caliber of clientele, his unsavory courtroom tactics, and the fact he held on to his radical political stances, his services fell out of favor. For a time, that is.
A large part of Barbet Schroeder's documentary revolves around Verges' 10 years of self-imposed exile following the deterioration, as it were, of his client base. Historian, private detective, and journalist testimony assemble a virtual puzzle of Verges' activities during this period of hiding as he was thought to travel frequently between France and Algeria. This turns out to be a less than fascinating, and shallowly explored angle to his story. The interest piques when he begins to plumb the theories revolving around Jacques Verges' stay inside Cambodia and his affiliation with The Khmer Rouge. The documentary plays connect-the-dots with a phalanx of German, Palestinian, French, Algerian, Spanish, and Iranian terrorist bombings, plots, affiliations, and the like, which constituted the violent geopolitical landscape of that time.
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