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Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgård in The small threshing machine.
Photo: Jonathan Olley / AMC / Ink Factory / © 2018 Ink Factory and AMC Film Holdings LLC. All rights reserved.
Set in the 1970s and imbued with ambiguity and paranoia, John Le Carré's new adaptation spy thriller The small threshing machine is fascinated by the reflections – both of the real type, captured in the mirrors and windows and in the viewfinders of cameras used for surveillance, and the artistic mirrors we encounter in fiction and mythology, on television screens and cinema and theater. The main character is a 22-year-old British actress, Charmaine "Charlie" Ross (Florence Pugh), leaning to the left, driven by an elaborate Mossad plan to convince a leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization to to be captured, thus blocking a suitcase. the attacks that killed Israelis.
Israeli spy master Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon), who believes he is a narrator, concocts the plan. Another Israeli spy, known as Gadi (Alexander Skarsgård) but who takes other names, first convinces Charlie that he is the brother of the terrorist leader, whom Charlie saw at the time. A tour across the continent, talking about the persecution of Palestinians by Israel while he was wearing a mask to hide his identity. Once Gadi took Charlie to Kurtz's orbit, she confirmed the Israelis' insistence that they simply wanted to end the violence and agreed to participate in the plan, considering it the ultimate challenge. Action. Gadi travels Europe with Charlie, creating a backdrop that will infiltrate the group.
Like Le Carré's novel and George Roy Hill's 1984 film adaptation starring Diane Keaton and Klaus Kinski, this mini-series does not hesitate to accept the art-life blur and discuss it in context. Of the history. Kurtz says, "I am the producer, the writer and the director of our little show" and continues as a filmmaker who likes to give interviews and who has an aphorism for every occasion. Charlie compares the construction of his cover and his infiltration to an experimental theatrical production, while Gadi commemorates his participation by welcoming him to the "theater of reality". A little of this kind goes a long way. And some of them look like a preemptive attempt to repel all the viewers who complain about the intellectual and thematic richness of the series, but not as distracting and emotionally involving, given the topic being dealt with: woman claiming to be something that she is not, in the presence of people who would murder her if they discovered.
Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook (The servant, Old boy) – who directed the six episodes of this series, an AMC pickup truck first shown on BBC One last month – amplifies the script by Michael Lesslie and Claire Wilson, an intellectual puzzle that hops over time and is more comfortable in a mosaic of moments and ideas accompanied by detailed comments. Mini-series often overlap between scenes based on the shared theme rather than taking place simultaneously in different locations. Sometimes he edits moments together to create confusion or a wrong impression, and then to solve problems later. Some important information is secretly hidden for a long time – to create suspense and surprise, or to calm our minds in a particular path – then new information will make us realize that we do not see what we think we have. saw.
Judged purely as a piece of narrative architecture, The small threshing machine is dazzling. There are always four or five things going on in each shot, and the editing never takes the story exactly as you would like. But the fact that the PLO is primarily treated as romantic or threatening abstractions throughout the first half of history makes the story look even more like an episode of the 1970s than it would have done. been anyway. And even at its best, it may seem theoretical and bloodless, less an international boiler with life and death issues than a series of proposals carefully scrutinized by the people who organize them.
Pugh, a superstar in the making, is superb, making Charlie a woman who has the infallible ability to identify all the trees that surround her, but who continues to miss the forest. But the rest of the distribution is poorly served. Skarsgård fails to create the man of mystery required by history. Here, he is more of a superb camera subject than a convincing actor on screen, confusing systematically reluctance for intensity, and heaping his energy to the point that he seems tired or distracted during many of his scenes. Shannon, one of the biggest American actors still alive, is giving one of her very rare poor performances, one that feels built from the outside rather than the inhabited one. inside. With his big glasses and frizzy hair provided by the service of grooming and accessories, and a voice that seems doubled while he does it in the room, it is as confusing as Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck playing a Nazi hunter and a Nazi in Boys from Brazil, or Robert Shaw playing a Mossad agent in 1977 Black Sunday.
This is one of those productions where you can feel the enthusiasm of everyone to work with accomplished artists on a promising piece, but which nevertheless never translates into a low-level conceptual buzz for the viewer. As in 2016 The night manager – the first of a series apparently in the process of adapting the Carré TV supervised by his children – it is a mixed bag prodigiously produced, intelligent and of good taste, more interesting to think than to look at.
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