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Published in the intervening years between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager'S releases, author John the Square's The Little Drummer Girl represents something of a trade-off between the best qualities of those two books. There is, as in Tinker Tailor, a distinctly cerebral aspect to Drummer Girl'S intricate period politics, but it' s a broadly accessible piece of work because it 's tempered by The Night ManagerPulpier style of storytelling. It makes sense, then, that any potential director of Drummer Girl'S TV adaptation should similarly embody that sense of commercial-critical darlinghood – it's still something of a surprise that it is audacious Korean author Park Chan-wook who takes the helm for the AMC-BBC co-production.
Two hours-deep into Drummer GirlThat makes it seem natural. The Carré's globe-trotting, '70s-set spy thriller actually incorporates many of Chan-wook's authorist hallmarks: the story's political backdrop (Israel-Palestine) is a befitting a setting a revenge-obsessed director is likely to get, and the highly stylized period demands the kind of sumptuous aesthetics Chan-wook has been serving up Revenge trilogy. There is, too, the fact that Drummer Girl'S plot takes a meta turn very early on its six-episode run, allowing Chan-wook ample opportunity to treat this intellectually meaty material with all the rigor of a student philosophy (which he once was).
The Charmian Ross (Florence Pugh, dazzlingly charismatic), a small-time theater player and part-time man with a knack for embellishing reality so that it mirrors the heightened drama of the works she spends her evenings reciting. This is not quite Killing Eve Charlie, as she is known, is always somewhat impenetrable, remaining something of a mystery even among her friends. We do not get much more from an inkling to the truth, by which point she has been whisked off to Athens by way of several dramatic turns. First, a wealthy anonymous benefactor flies her acting troupe out to a Greek island, where they keep bumping into the same, the same enigmatic man (Alexander Skarsgatrd). It's with him – Skarsgård's character is known interchangeably as José and Joseph at this point, but he does not know anything about it. – Charlie travels by boat to Athens, abandoning friends and jealous-minded boyfriend (Max Irons) in the process.
There, Drummer Girl takes its Truman Show-that turn, tonal shift that colors everything that follows. In Athens, José and Charlie arrives at a secluded villa where a group is patiently awaiting their presence – all strangers with the exception of Rose, a South African "tourist" Charlie puts on the island. Like her, it turns out there is more than one person in the world.Michael Shannon, here playing a looser version of his institution-personified roles in Waco, Nocturnal Animals and Tea Shape of Water). A recent spate of bombings targeting Jewish diplomats and their families Kurtz to suspect a group of Palestinian brothers, but the conventional tactics have been taken away; now, Kurtz 's own radical approach is being given to the green light, and he wants Charlie to join him by taking the lead in his "theater of the real".
If it's worth that Drummer Girl'S first two hours signal a willingness in Chan-wook and screenwriter Michael Lesslie to reckon with the moral ambiguity of their characters and their respective politics. The freedom-fighter-or-terrorist debate plays in Charlie and Kurtz's conversations, while the fluidity of a person's identity is intelligently evoked in Jose / Joseph / Becker's many aliases and the show's editing style those of their ideological rivals Similar technical keys include Kim Woo-hyungParthenon's under-lighting during Charlie and José's first kiss, there is a sense of purpose behind Drummer GirlAesthetics. Everything just looks Good, too: Maria Djurkovic'S production design channels the' 70s through the varying style prisms of West Germany, Greece, and London, while an undercurrent of Warhol eroticism runs through Steven Noble and Sheena Napier'S bold costumes (look out for Pugh' s Little Blue Riding Hood look).
Though his audacious style is down-to-the-bottom TV execs, Chan-wook finds a way to his signature touch to persist under Drummer Girl'S glossy finish: from the shaky interior of a speeding car to the slow, sensuous movements of a man applying sunscreen to a woman' s back, there is a sense of touch realism throughout.
These first two episodes are very useful – patchy accents included – feels thematically linked. Initiating us into that world is no easy task, and perhaps that's why, after two hours of Drummer Girl, hearings might feel inclined to pause and take things in before diving back into the Carré's labyrinthine plot. Yet the screenplay's philosophical approach, Chan-wook's hypnotic direction and the similar magnetism of Pugh and Shannon will ultimately drive you, propelling you deeper into The Little Drummer Girl's beguiling world.
The Little Drummer Girl will have its US first on AMC on November 9, and in the UK on BBC One on October 28.
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