Revisiting Costa-Gavras’s Z: The Politics of Storytelling

Movies that attempt to capture the political climate of the current moment often promise catharsis but rarely deliver it. The desire to make sense of crisis while it’s still unfolding too often produces work that feels self-righteous and schematic. Earlier this year, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, earned praise for escaping that trap, offering its audience something both topical and genuinely imaginative, without lapsing into cynicism and despair. 

I thought of Z, Costa-Gavras’s 1969 masterpiece, while watching it. Born Konstantinos Gavras in Greece in 1933, Costa-Gavras grew up amid political repression. His father was blacklisted during the Greek Civil War, and he was prohibited from attending university in his home country, forcing him to leave for Paris. There he forged a distinctive style that fused popular-thriller techniques with political critique, establishing a model taken up by directors such as Pakula, Friedkin, Soderbergh, and Stone. 

Like One Battle After Another, Z is a film about military conspiracy. It is, in many ways, the quintessential political thriller of the 1960s, born in a decade of assassinations and uprisings. Loosely speaking, the film follows the investigation and attempted cover-up of a military-orchestrated assassination. One of its peculiarities is that it manages to be both highly stylized and documentary-like, committed to a gritty vérité aesthetic. Z is based on the real-life assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis, a left-wing Greek politician who campaigned for nuclear disarmament and opposed Greece’s involvement in the Cold War. Yet, apart from Costa-Gavras’s own Greek background, the film barely reflects the national specifics of its source. It stars French actors speaking their native language, is ambiguously set in “Greece,” though never stated as such, and was actually shot in Algeria. This dislocation creates a discombobulating experience, as Costa-Gavras strives for truthfulness to real events while presenting a world unmistakably artificial. Indeed, this tension between truth and representation reflects the moral ethos at the very heart of the movie. Its political force emerges not only from its exposure of corruption, but from its self-conscious examination of how events become stories.

The film opens by exploring how every contest for power is, at its core, a struggle over space. To campaign for office is to occupy both literal and symbolic ground. From the outset, the “Deputy” (modeled on Lambrakis) searches for a venue in which he is to give a public lecture, while the military, serving as the government’s covert enforcers, tries to suppress him by denying him physical space. He ultimately finds a bare, functional hall, much too small for the crowd that gathers. When he finishes his speech and crosses the square, a three-wheeled vehicle barrels toward him. In the collision between man and machine, where the latter can physically overwhelm the former, the outcome is predetermined.

The next act? of the film makes clear that every attempt to explain an event is also a struggle to control its story. The assassination is public, witnessed by masses of people, and yet the truth of things becomes opaque through deliberate obfuscation. Officials insist it was a drunken accident. Their own lies collapse under contradiction, not least because their own ideological foundations are incoherent. The generals see themselves as defenders of democracy and the Western order against communism, yet they despise American influence and embrace fascist discipline; among other things, they are anti-Semites. At one point, a journalist asks a senior officer if he, too, is innocent like Dreyfus, a military officer falsely accused of treason and later exonerated. But the general hesitates. To agree would mean aligning himself with a Jew. His answer—“But Dreyfus was guilty!”—is a perfect moment of irony: confession disguised as denial, revealing that these men cannot even sustain the fictions they tell themselves.

One of Z’s most striking insights is that truth, once spoken, risks becoming just another narrative. The politician’s allies face precisely this paradox: if they accuse the military of conspiracy, no one will believe them because that version aligns too neatly with public suspicion. In a regime of propaganda, truth is indistinguishable from rhetoric. Every story competes to occupy the same terrain.

Ultimately, the magistrate’s investigation exposes the perpetrators, and until the final moments, Z appears to affirm the triumph of truth. But the epilogue overturns that resolution, showing that truth is ultimately suppressed by a more brutal form of physical force—the military coup of 1967. The junta banned not only books and political parties, but even the letter ‘z’ itself, the symbol of Lambrakis’ movement, meaning “he lives.” The progression comes full circle: behind physical domination lies narrative control, and every narrative, in turn, reproduces another hierarchy of power.

Half a century later, Z feels more contemporary than most movies made in the 21st century. Costa-Gavras understood that the most dangerous temptation in political life is not corruption or violence, but the belief that truth, once revealed, can restore moral order. The magistrate’s triumph feels momentary because it is. The film suggests that the struggle does not end when the truth is told, or when the ‘good’ official appears to do the right thing. In this sense, One Battle After Another continues Z’s project from a different angle, dismantling the savior narrative through its hapless, burnt-out revolutionary, Bob Ferguson. 

Costa-Gavras warned us in the opening crawl: “Any similarity to persons or events is not accidental. It is deliberate.” Today, the resemblance hardly needs the disclaimer. 

Sophie Elliott is a sophomore in CC studying Applied Math. She is passionate about film, literature, and classical music. 

@_sophie.elliott