This set a template for what followed. In 2007’s “Terror’s Advocate,” about the slick, serpentine, self-aggrandizing lawyer Jacques Vergès (whose client roster included Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and perhaps even Pol Pot), and in this picture, “The Venerable W.,” about Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk in Myanmar fomenting racial hatred and violence against that country’s Muslim population, Schroeder lets the men sitting for these portraits have their own heads, so to speak.
In both his fiction and documentary work, Schroeder has long illuminated dark corners of human behavior. His best known U.S.-made film is “Reversal of Fortune,” a fictionalized drama about Claus von Bulow and his own slick lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. “The Venerable W.” begins by digging a little into the contradiction of Buddhist hate-mongering. An offscreen Maria de Medeiros, embodying, according to the end credits, a “small Buddhist voice,” explains that the Buddha is human, not a god, then states “The Buddha is often above good and evil, but his words should help us limit the mechanics of evil.”
Wirathu, now 50, became aligned with Myanmar’s nationalist 969 movement in 2001 and has founded, since that movement was banned, a similarly anti-Muslim organization. His brief is that Myanmar’s Muslim population (which he refuses to refer to as Rohingya, which is how the stateless people refer to themselves) represents a mechanics of evil. To Schroeder’s camera and in public preaching, he pursues this theme with relentless insistence while denying he condones violence. But the words he preaches to his followers go well beyond implication. And the violence he inspires, shown in this film in footage culled from phone videos and other immediate media sources, is horrific.
The monk is perhaps the least showy of the subjects of Schroeder’s trilogy. He speaks quietly, although his mouth often twists into an expression of petulant smugness. But in a sense, this is the most terrifying of Schroder’s portraits. Amin, as heinous as he was, was one person, as was Vergès. Wirathu represents an awful idea, one that cannot be banished, and one he propagates with chilling skill. He speaks of “seeing through the intentions of Muslims,” which sounds ridiculous. But then he talks of ISIS beheadings, and how in footage of these atrocities the perpetrators, after completing their work, raise a finger, to signify that there is only one God. He takes factual examples, distorts them, uses them to slander a whole faith and a whole people, and concludes that the Muslim “cannot be lived with.” And people believe, then follow him.
Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.
—
‘The Venerable W.’ is not rated. In English, French, Spanish and Burmese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.