Archive for category: Gritty

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Genre: Spy Film

Platform: Amazon Prime – BBC Player

Time: 3 hours – 2 x 1.5 hour mini series

Director:  Edward Hall

Cast:   Michelle Dockery (Ruth Gilmartin). Charlotte Rampling (Sally Gilmartin). Hayley Atwell (Eva Delectorskaya). Rufus Sewell (Lucas Romer). Michael Gambon (Lord Romer). Michael Peter Willis (Jochen).

Plot:  In the early 1970s, Ruth Gilmartin is visiting her mother with her son Jochen. Her mother Sally is behaving in increasingly suspicious and erratic ways , peering at the surrounding countryside through binoculars, looking for strangers and telling Ruth that ‘they’ are watching her. When a concerned Ruth asks what is going on, Sally gives her a set of typed pages that talks about the life of Eva Delectorskaya . Ruth thinks that her mother is joking when Sally says that she adopted the name and identity Sally Gilmartin, after coming to England during WW2 and she is really the Eva in the typed pages. Ruth reads with increasing astonishment about how Eva was contacted by Lucas Romer, supposedly belonging to a news syndicate but actually running some kind of secret information network into which she is soon inducted, resulting in a series of daring escapades during WW2….

Structurally, the mini series flits back and forth between the current where Ruth gets increasingly drawn into Sally’s world. In the past we see what Eva goes through as a trainee, and then as an agent. If I say anything about the plot it would be a series of spoilers. So let me focus on some of the clever stuff in the film that is based on real incidents.

Some of the early disasters of SIS/MI6 , and other true life incidents, are cleverly woven into the story. Especially the “Venlo incident” where the resident MI6 officers in Amsterdam were lured to a border post at Venlo and kidnapped by German SD agents who bundled them into a car and simply drove over the border into Germany (Holland was neutral in 1939 and it/ Western Europe had not been invaded by Nazis). Here the incident occurs at a town named ‘Preslo’ , near the border with Nazi Germany (very clever ) .

Lucas and Eva become lovers and she is sent to America in early 1940. Romer sets up a “security office” in New York and this clearly a mirror of the real life BSC – British Security Coordination , which was also based in New York. BSC was set up to “coordinate” activities with the FBI , who were overall in charge of all security activities, there being no external intelligence organization in the US at that time. As part of this security activities, Eva is even tasked to sleep with one of Roosevelt’s aides , so that he can be blackmailed and thus pressurized into getting the US on the British side.

      

 In yet another meeting, she sees a nameless man present at a meeting and listening intently to everything she says but some days later the man is dead by suicide. He is identified as a Soviet defector Nekich. This mirrors Walter Krivitsky, one of the earliest Russian defectors and who wrote a book In Stalin’s Secret Service aka I Was Stalin’s agent. Krivitsky was found dead mysteriously in a hotel – just like Nekich in the film.

         

Such real-life incidents are peppered through the movie.

The rest of the story is somewhat predictable as she sees that her colleagues in New York are mysteriously dying/ killed and there are enemy agents on the loose in New Mexico whom she is supposed to deal with alone. But who are the people who want to kill Eva? The enemy agents? or someone else? Someone close to home?

         

However, the overall atmosphere including the production design of offices of those times, costumes, cars and so on. This part is exceptional and is often intercut with the “current” happenings in the 1970s as Ruth is being pressurised by Special Branch , as her German lover is supposedly a member of the infamous Baader Meinhof terrorist group. It is at this time that Ruth believes that her mother was correct and there is some kind of coverup, all the way to the highest levels in the government.

                   

The film is based on writer William Boyd’s novel of the same name which also follows a similar structure in flitting between the past and the present. The performances are superb. The basic premise of a mole inside our organization, is as old as spy fiction, but it is done in an engaging way so much that you want to see “where will this go”, “what will happen to Eva” and so on.  Since this is a mini movie of one and half hour each, the two mini movies are a worthy binge watch (which is how I did it).

Script – 5 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 4 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Production Design – 5 out of 5

 

Total – 4.4 out of 5