Recap of The Little Drummer Girl: First Episode – A Textured Shadow Game | Television and radio

West Germany, 1979: a place where cars are brown copper, the coats are corduroy and the coveted leather luggage could contain a bomb. As for the scathing opening sequences for the Sunday night drama series, the train scene and the prolongation of the suicide brawl against Bodyguard's suicide vest set the bar very high. The drummer's little girl walked a little faster, but even in just three minutes, she managed to redouble impressive dread, aided by the constant sound of a timepiece replacing the soundtrack. Through the intermediary of a motorcycle, a car and, finally, a pretty woman emissary, a mysterious beige suitcase was transported from a dark apartment to a diplomatic residence. Israel in Bad Godesberg, south of Bonn. There was no last-minute respite. It was a story determined to begin with an explosion.

Even in this brief sequence, there was enough careful scrutiny and an impressive production value on the screen to suggest that the latter Le Carré was created by the producers of The Night Manager. It was a luxury adaptation – in the casting, rhythm and parade of five-star sets – although he made major changes to the novel, redefining action on the present and permuting gender equality. The Little Drummer Girl seems more faithful to its source, keeping the setting of 1979 (which means a wilder fashion but probably a worse wine), although wrapping 650 dense pages in three six-hour episodes requires narrative footwork sophisticated.

In the novel, the actor Frank, but in difficulty, Charlie, Charlie – technically Charmian but no one calls it so – will not appear until the story has already resumed with the investigation on the bombings. Here, she arrives after the title sequence, introduced via a squeeze screen audition. We see her bristling with the insane suggestions of invisible casting agents and we witness her gift for clarifying the truth as she delivers an improvised monologue punctuated by a flashback, transforming what was a pretty nasty crash in the billiard room in a dazzling moral victory. The fact that Charlie is presented at mid-performance (in a scene invented for adaptation) seems significant; Pugh is a convincing brand.

Elsewhere, Israeli spy master Martin Kurtz – called Marty by his team, and offering various fake identities to everyone – reviews the attack on Bad Godesberg, cleverly hiding the additional details of the traumatized attache if dazzled on the doorstep. Convinced that it is the latest attack by Michel and Khalil, two elusive brothers of the PLO, Kurtz persuades his superior to try a new strategy: replace bombs, baits. For Michael Shannon, who currently plays the figures of the belligerent authority with The Shape of Water and the Fahrenheit 451 of HBO, it's a slightly more shady and scattered creation: with his indomitable hair, his mustache and his glbades, Kurtz looks a bit like Kurt Vonnegut. Shannon may be volcanic on the screen, but here he looks measured and patient (we have a scene of him exploding in the sky, but it's just for testing the soundproofing in an improvised interrogation cell).

If Shannon understands her usual physical presence, the third head – Becker, played by Alexander Skarsgård – can not hide her. At first, he is only a shadow at one of Charlie's performances, in London, of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan in London, a simple golden dial. Then he finds himself again in Naxos, after Charlie's theater troupe has had a very practical corporate concert. The stripped blond stranger introduces himself as Peter, but is immediately nicknamed Joseph by Charlie, who in turn seems enraged and fascinated by this self-proclaimed half-breed. An apparently soulful piece with a dark side? Skarsgård has this niche sewn after Big Little Lies.

Joseph's attempts to intrigue Charlie – reading about Chilean socialism; show his scars while cutting powerfully through the waves; Out Boutari wine at breakfast – were relatively subtle. Kurtz's pursuit on his target, however, was a little more energetic: after tracing the younger brother Michel to a safe house in Munich, he orchestrated a honey trap for the hitchhiker to secure Michel and his magnificent Mercedes red, the ideal vehicle for smuggling semtex into Turkey. . Finally, Joseph also caught his prey, delicately separating Charlie from his theater friends and his lost boyfriend, Al, and taking him on a night mission to the Acropolis.

The scene of the Acropolis plays a central role in the novel and runs wonderfully here. In addition to the superb drone images of the historic site – with a high marble pillar in the shape of Skarsgård – Charlie had some fun lines that Pugh seemed to love: "I'm not a fan of al fresco groping, I eat three dishes for mozzies. It also showed Charlie's excellent memorizing power, presumably refined by a hundred hasty auditions, as she had correctly identified Joseph's scholarly spiel as being extracted directly from a guide. Getting a private viewing of one of the wonders of the world during a hot and romantic Greek night is an absolute gesture for a first date, but just when Charlie seemed ready to get things done, Joseph went away.

A high speed car trip in a familiar red Mercedes later and Joseph had delivered his human load to his boss, blending the fate of the three main characters as the excess wire signature that Khalil smuggled into his bombs. While disoriented Charlie was getting away from the car, Kurtz was taking center stage with a theatrical epic: "I'm the producer, the writer and the director of our little show … and I'd like tell you about your role. "The shadow has begun.

Park Performance Assessment

The Little Drummer Girl is full of surface stylistic pleasures, with vintage-style décor featuring a parade of bulbous lights, squeaky cushions and voluminous hi-fi equipment. But it's also fun to try to detect the human hand behind the six episodes: Park Chan-wook, the Korean director of inventive but visceral revenge movies such as Old Boy and The Handmaiden. Until now, Park and his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung seem to be in favor of the low position of the camera. Their actors are therefore framed by a succession of angular or dark ceilings. If the first episode seemed to slip, there was a noticeable visual obstacle: a bad suddenly as Charlie threw a tavern chair to Joseph. Will anyone eat a live octopus or will he take a jackhammer into a band of hoods during a single-shot fight, from two brands of the park? We will have to wait and see.

Spying notes and observations

• Very difficult to hear, Charlie describes Joseph as a "man of international mystery" without thinking of Austin Powers.

• Carefully grabbing Charlie's pacifier stick while walking on the beach, Joseph suggested an uncompromising attitude against rubbish or a breakthrough craft technique in which he left no trace.

• So far, Max Irons had only one small role to play in Charlie's boyfriend – in the book, a red-haired Scottish slapping him, here a tyrant with a black complexion and black hair that sounds a bit south -African?

• After all the hubbub caused by a supposed ban on nudity, there was still a lot of bare flesh and, especially in the Naxos section, an invading atmosphere of languorous sensuality.

• Fortunately developed decades before the release of Wonderwall, Charlie's acoustic guitar sound was the old murder ballad Maria Marten, taken from a true story dating back to 1827. Shirley Collins and the band Albion recorded a haunting version in 1971.