Espionage thrillers are a very complicated thing to handle, especially when they have to move in the field of television. Even those with a lot going for them to succeed, like those who adapt to John LeCarre -King Midas from the spy novel-, they have to break their horns so as not to lose the viewer in a tangled and confusing plotto which it is easy to tend by having to maintain mysteries and deceptions between characters to maintain the façade of espionage.
For this reason, the best works that involve spies are not those that have a well-chewed and clear plot – if anything, those can be made too linear. They are the ones who compensate through other channels, such as explosive sequences, careful atmosphere or narrative finesse that has you trapped to not realize that nothing that happens makes sense. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find something that brings it all together, like ‘The Girl with the Drum’, a fabulous miniseries by Park Chan Wook that we can find on HBO Max.
Actress, risky profession
The Korean director takes one of the most complex and intricate novels by Le Carré, carrying over eight episodes -or six, if you find another version that modifies the montage to fewer installments- the machinations of a Mossad operation after the Munich massacre, one of the most prominent acts of Palestinian terrorism. His plan involves an actress (Florence Pugh) What is it brought into this dangerous world to catch a ringleader of these terrorists.
You don’t have much of a choice about it. Before realizing it, she must pull the actress’s trade to pretend to be the wife of agent Becker (Alexander Skarsgard), whose relationship will begin to blur their professional barriers. One of the main attractions of this miniseries is how flirts with uncertainty and shows that barriers -moral, political, personal- they get really fuzzy. Is Pugh’s character an actress in an unappetizing situation? Is she a real spy? A terrorist? Maybe all at once?
Korean director shows more interest in those ambiguities than in the goings-on of the mystery and the operations, so whoever goes to ‘The girl with the drum’ trying to follow the coherence of the plot and the espionage operations can be lost. But he doesn’t need that to be an impeccably told serieswhich draws interesting parallels between art and acting with the smoke-and-mirrors hoaxes of intelligence agencies.
‘The girl with the drum’: elegant intrigue
Park Chan-Wook, an impeccable esthete who has shown his mastery in the so-called revenge trilogy -‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance‘, ‘Oldboy’ and ‘Sympathy for Lady Vengeance‘- and in other jewels such as ‘La doncella’, and here he gives another visual and narrative recital. Her trademark is evident in the flat details, or the interesting twists that she proposes to create tension that differentiate her from other works of the genre.
Along with his director of photography Kim Woo-hyung creates a lavish production, which It has great elegance and careful details, as well as unique audiovisual tools, and manages to keep you completely intrigued. It matters little if you are not clear about certain aspects of what is happening, because the atmosphere feels oppressive and appropriately paranoid.
The impressive production values, so impressive and duly chosen, help to make absolutely beautiful work. The performances of Pugh and Skarsgård are also excellent, bringing out the conflicts and ambiguities of their characters without repelling them, on the contrary. All this sets an impressive journey through the bowels of international espionage which becomes one of the best translations of Le Carré’s work to the audiovisual, along with ‘El topo’ and ‘El infiltrado’, and the best of Park’s works outside of South Korea.