The Little Drummer Girl: Go deep into John Le Carré country and surrender to this stylised spy thriller

Drawn together: Becker (Alexander Skarsgaard) and Charlie (Florence Pugh)
BBC/Ink Factory/The Little Drummer Girl Distribution Limited.
Alastair McKay26 October 2018

The last John le Carré television adaptation, The Night Manager, was murderously beautiful and fascinated by wealth.

Its plot about the lawless mores of the super-rich had a contemporary sheen. The anti-hero, Hugh Laurie’s Richard Roper (aka The Worst Man In The World), took moral vacuity to such an extreme that it almost became attractive.

The Little Drummer Girl, as directed by the South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, is something different.

It is locked in its period, the late Seventies, though it feels aesthetically more like 1973, with its radical London theatre group and its hot-pant hitchhiker and carefree Greek beaches, where a bored English woman might spot a man of mystery with scars on his skin and fall into a web of international intrigue.

Leads: Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgard as Charlie and Becker
BBC / The Little Drummer Girl Distribution Limited.

(True, there is a scene in a London pub where the Clash’s Armagideon Time is playing, which puts us in 1979, but this England doesn’t feel very punk, or as jagged and derelict as you’d expect on the scree slopes of Thatcherism.)

The woman is Charlie (Florence Pugh). The Action Man is Becker (Alexander Skarsgård). She is attracted to him on account of his reticence and his scars and his sunglasses. Is it mutual? Possibly, though it could be something else.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Episode one of this thriller gets its thrills in early and late. There is an explosion, and a significant plot development right at the end. There is a calm, then a hellride. The bits in between are like a broken jigsaw, with information dispensed on a need-to-know basis.

The Little Drummer Girl

1/9

First, let’s fill in the sky. There is a Palestinian terrorist cell at work, and it is being tracked by the Israelis. The Israeli intelligence boss Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) is pulling the strings. Marty is less impulsive than some of his colleagues, who would like to get on with the business of blowing up the Palestinians. “Let us be surgeons this time,” he counsels, “not butchers.”

Now let’s look at the shapes and colours. Park Chan-wook is best known for his Vengeance trilogy, the most famous part of which is Oldboy, a nightmarish manga noir in which a confused man eats a live octopus in a bar.

Thus far, Park has not deployed the calamari in anger but his sensuous style is everywhere. He shoots in the dark, so everything is shadowplay. The light is blue when it remembers not to be brown. Even in daylight you may feel the need to turn on your head-torch. Down on that Greek beach there is a sense of sunshine passing through gauze.

So where are we? Deep in Le Carré country, following the signs and still getting lost, surrendering to intrigue. The disgusting glamour of The Night Manager is absent. Instead, there is an almost fetishistic interest in strip lights and corridors, and the pleasing geometry of stairwells. There are attachés with attaché cases. Sentences are elliptical, blunt.

Reality is a forensic mystery addressed in the list-like poetry of the career bureaucrat. “Blonde or brunette, dyed or natural, up or down?” is a question in an interrogation, as Marty the spook tries to identify a mysterious au pair in a car. Well, not just a car: a copper brown NSU with a missing headrest.

And so it goes, and the watch ticks, too slowly for comfort.

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