Malkovich in role switch

The plague raging through the world today isn't medical: it's political. It is terrorism. Albert Camus had infection metaphorically in mind when he wrote his play L'Etat de SiËge (State of Siege). The Franco-Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras used the same title for his 1972 political thriller about CIA meddling in South America. The US was the plague-bearer.

And in John Malkovich's ambitious and highly successful directorial debut, a video of that film is frequently the object of meditation by Javier Bardem's captain in the anti-terrorist police. It's also the template Malkovich has adopted to film Nicholas Shakespeare's script about the politics of insurrection in a Latin American republic, unnamed but obviously Peru, where the Shining Path terrorist guerrilla chief Abimael Guzman was captured in a flat above a Lima ballet school.

All this would have made even a seasoned director draw breath at the magnitude of his referential scenario - there are simply so many layers to this story. Yet the triumph of what we watch is the apparently effortless unfolding of its horrors. It makes violent revolution feel real and near.

Using English - accented heavily enough to create a proxy reminder of the foreign latitude we're in - Malkovich assembles a state-wide picture of creeping terror. The bits and pieces of corruption at a multitude of social levels shake down into a crisis without a centre. But what holds the big picture steady, binds events together, is Javier Bardem. This marvellous Spaniard is an actor who wears his gravitas lightly, but carries it authoritatively.

His looks have the strength of a primitive and a little of the distortion of a Picasso - in profile, his Iberian nose seems to be simply an extension of the forehead. Cunning as well as integrity hint at the captain's own humble rural roots, which conscience and ambition have transplanted into a hard slog of a police career, rather than an easy ride in lawyers' chambers. It's a performance in the great European tradition: it takes life as its model.

The police are just one of many "states within the state", and not the most powerful, either. The presidential palace, the judiciary, the military all keep so wary an eye on each other that it's a distraction to them when terrorism begins putting the state itself under siege. The dialectic of revolution is very precise. Small and inexplicable incidents disseminate gossip and unease: dead dogs hanging from street lights, placards hailing a mysterious " President Ezequiel".

Then come assassinations - at first petty, provincial functionaries, then more generalised outrages. A chicken or a dog with lighted dynamite wired to its leg causes carnage in country markets. But in the capital, the great state receptions continue, with Bardem cooling his heels on diplomatic guard duty, though the discovery of a death threat in the president's own lavatory suggests even its walls are fatally porous.

All this is terrorism without an agenda - only acts. "What does it mean?" Bardem's baffled commander (Oliver Cotton) asks. Comes the measured reply: "It looks like a revolution.î The film maintains this uncertainty about what's happening, why it's happening and who's making it happen, while all the time collating a horrifying variety of happenings.

The "sparrow patrolsî, for instance: schoolkids wired with explosives "going offî in tapas bars; schoolgirls in fresh crisp uniforms at the bus stop outside the Navy Minister's sumptuous villa. "What age would you be?î asks the Cabinet officer, leering lasciviously at a mini-skirted imp. For answer, she drills him through his frontal lobes.

ANOTHER outrage, surreal this time, occurs as the dancers in a ballet infiltrate the black-tied VIP audience, slipping past their bodyguards to execute the political patrons of the avantgarde work. "Lucky it wasn't Evita,î is the dry comment, or the body count would be higher.