Totems (2021) – Superb, Atmospheric.

Genre: Spying

Platform: Amazon Prime

Time : 8 episodes x average 55 minutes

Language: French (with English subtitles)

Director: Frédéric Jardin (4 episodes). Jérôme Salle (2 episodes). Antoine Blossier (2 episodes)

Cast:  Niels Schneider (Francis Mareuil). Vera Kolesnikova (Lyudmila Goloubeva). José Garcia (Virgile/Virgile Hiriart). Lambert Wilson (Charles Contignet). Aleksei Guskov (Boris Golubev).

Plot:  In the mid-1960s,  a defecting Soviet rocket scientist is brought through the East German border to West Germany and France, accompanied by a bodyguard cum minder Virgil. The scientist gives alarming news; the Soviets have a nuclear warhead orbiting the earth that can be steered and targeted at any Western city. Francis is a rocket scientist with the French agency CNES, who wants to redeem himself , as his father had committed suicide after being exposed as a Russian Mole. Lyudmila Golubeva, who only wants to be a famous pianist, is threatened and violently coerced by the KGB who break her hand, to contact her estranged rocket scientist father Boris Golubev , become his secretary and report everything that he does as the rocket program is controlled by the Army , to which they want access.  Charles Contignet, Francis’s godfather and his father’s friend , explains the situation to Francis and asks him to go first to East Germany , establish a contact with Lyudmila and hopefully persuade her father, who is coming to Berlin for a conference on space technology,  to defect to France. The machinations start and soon the untrained Francis and  the equally raw Lyudmila are caught up in international intrigues in which they are pawns in a larger game…

Each episode is about 55 minutes. So that’s approximately 8 hours of viewing. Yet I binge watched this one over one and half days. It is atmospheric, hardly has James Bondery, shows real life spying as it is and is exceptionally authentic in its overall background and the nitty gritty of spying. Eg – the tyro Francis is a literal babe in the woods when it comes to East Berlin, since he is used to traveling freely in France. He literally blunders into situation, till Virgil guides him what NOT to do . Francis and Virgil follow ‘Moscow Rules’ – it means that DO NOT assume that you are NOT under surveillance. Whenever they meet daily, Virgil always behaves as if he does not know Francis while passing instructions.

The ordinary Russian being pressurized to work for the KGB also sounds very real. After a brief period of ‘openness’ under Khrushchev, it was back to oppressive normalcy under Brezhnev who was the leader in 1965 and who had given a free reign to the military to catch up with the West, after the humiliation of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Though it doesn’t figure in any way in the series, the military’s drive to develop ever newer and exotic weapons is a fallout of the 1962 Crisis which develops into yet another major crisis as the orbiting warhead goes rogue due to a contradictory signal. Soon everyone is hopping from one place to another – Algeria where an orbiting rocket capsule falls, giving clues to Francis, Prague where  Lydumila is unsuccessful at defecting , the overall oppressive KGB surveillance in Soviet Union and ‘socialist friends’ like Czechoslovakia, the not so friendly rivalry with the CIA – it’s a somewhat complex mystery that soon unravels into a final somewhat Bond-film style climax. Barring the somewhat stretched episode 5, a Bond film style climatic torture + shootout, and a somewhat soppy Hindi filmi ending,  the series is simply superb and atmospheric as it takes us back to the bad dark days of the ‘old’ Cold War which was fought by all the Western/ NATO allies as the Russians simply flooded the West with intelligence operatives from both the KGB and their ‘friendly socialist countries’. France was usually at the receiving end of American and British distrust as it was assumed – and finally discovered – that the French Secret Service SDECE (later DGSE) , leaked like a sieve. (Referred to again in the Alfred Hitchcock film Topaz ,about which sometime in the future)

If this historical background is kept in mind , the series is simply superb with all round excellent performances. Watch out for the sepia tone underexposed photography in the ‘East Bloc’ scenes.

Script – 5 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 5 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Total – 4.5 out of 5