Product Details

• Actors: Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla, Jean Carmet, Jerzy Skolimowski, Gila von Weitershausen
• Directors: Volker Schlöndorff
• Writers: Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière, Kai Hermann, Margarethe von Trotta, Nicolas Born
• Producers: Anatole Dauman, Eberhard Junkersdorf
• Format: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English, French, German
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Kino Video
• DVD Release Date: May 11, 2004
• Run Time: 108 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B0001XAJXO
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #78,091 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Circle of Deceit" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life in wartime . . ., November 5, 2007

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Made by German director Volker Schlondorff shortly after his Academy Award winning "The Tin Drum," this film plunged his crew and cast into the middle of Beirut during the civil war that had been raging there for six years. In the film, he attempts to comprehend the kind of urban political violence that has wracked cities from Sarajevo to Kabul to Baghdad in the years since. He explains correctly in the making-of short and an interview included on this DVD that in the absence of a strong central government, the militias of competing warlords, armed by other nations, have the capacity to continue in this kind of conflict for years, using fear, atrocity, and intimidation to turn ethnic groups against each other.

Along with a journalist, played by Bruno Ganz, we observe the daily and nightly routines of assaults and retaliations, the bombs and fire fights, the snipers, and the brutalizing of noncombatants. Schlondorff seems to be asking the audience to examine its own position as outsiders, viewing the carnage and mayhem almost as voyeurs. And we see how the events that reduce life to less than human or snuff it out altogether are reduced even further by the media churning it into news. In one scene, a man auctions off a handful of gruesome photographs to two competing news agencies.

As Schlondorff says, the ruined city streets and abandoned bombed-out buildings where they shot scenes were little different from those he knew as a boy in the aftermath of WWII. Ganz, we learn, was never comfortable working on the film, while his co-star, the amazing Hanna Schygulla, is clearly at home here and gives a breath-taking performance as the widow of a Lebanese Arab. The film is troubling and unnerving and certainly current, though it was made over 25 years ago.