The Little Drummer Girl on AMC, commented.

The little girl of the drummer, The refined adaptation of John le Carré's novel, directed by director Park Chan-wook, will premiere on AMC Monday night. In what appears to be an attempt to look roughly, the network broadcasts six episodes on consecutive nights, two episodes per night. Two episodes per night seem to be a reasonable amount: a generous portion of ice cream, but not all of the carton. But if you're like me, two hours will not be enough. I wanted to eat everything at once.

The series begins with a bombardment of 1979 in the West German capital, Bonn. A Mossad team led by Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) approaches the macabre scene and deduces that it is the work of a Palestinian terrorist cell composed of various Westerners and Michel (Amir Khoury), the youngest brother of the mysterious Khalil bomber. Kurtz concocts a plan to infiltrate Khalil's network – a project whose main actor is a young British actress with no experience in counterintelligence.

Charlie Ross (Florence Pugh) is a gypsy living in London who plays Joan of Arc with his theater troupe, which supports a silly boyfriend and who espouses a policy of left adapted to the period. His troupe has the opportunity to go to Greece, where they meet a tall, mysterious and spotted Tie Adonis, dressed in a plush swimsuit that we already know to be a Mossad agent named Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgård, playing tortured and a bit of wood). Charlie hates him, until she does not do it. He woo her, keeping her away from her friends, taking her on a private and dreamy tour of the Acropolis – then launching a spy project on her. The Israelis want Charlie, an actress with no connection to Israel who is not even a Jew, to play in what Kurtz likes to call "the theater of the real."

Appeal to Charlie's interest and skills as an actress – that will be her biggest role! The most important role that an actor can play! – The Israelis present a plan which, in the words of Cher Horowitz, is a real Monet: Up close, it is an old bazaar. From a distance, however, thanks to Park Chan-wook, everything seems hazy and beautiful (the mustard color has never been so elegant!) And slips in a sexy way. The Israelis explain to Charlie that they want to pass a fiction to convince Khalil and his associates that Charlie is the love of Michel and his political disciple, a trustworthy woman. In order to sell this trick, she and Gadi travel across Europe with him playing Michel, leaving a trace of their couple. Gadi even plays Michel with Charlie, forcing her story and personality so that she could better inhabit her character, a woman deeply in love with Michel and devoted to the Palestinian cause. It's an espionage improvisation: three-dimensional, high-stakes preliminaries in which fiction, lust, control and strategy are as impossible to untangle as a ball of string after it has been attacked by a pack of wild cats.

It is an espionage improvisation: three-dimensional preliminaries with big stakes, in which fiction, lust, control and strategy are as impossible to untangle as a string ball after it has been thrown by a group of fierce. cats.

All these psychosexual espionage games, which build the world, occupy the first half of the series, what I realized by treading it like a popcorn reminded me nothing as much as the first two seasons of the series. Country. Do not run away! I believe that, as the word zaftig, really may be a compliment, when it is applied in the right conditions. As these first seasons of Country, it's a realpolitik espionage drama with ridiculous plots (and foreign accents) that vibrates in the sexual chemistry of a spy and a manager, ostensibly spying on center of history becoming the backdrop of a novel between bright and tortured people who should know better. If everything gets a bit cheesy sometimes, you will have to find someone who hates roms much more than me to complain about it.

The back half of Little drummer separates Gadi and Charlie. Kurtz's plan works: Charlie is approached by the emissaries of Khalil's outfit and taken to Palestine for further training. Will she remain an Israeli agent or will she turn against her masters? I did not read Little drummer for years, and my hazy memory served this adaptation well: it did not bother me that it was much lighter than the book. In the novel, Charlie's experiences in Palestine are deeper, more durable and more trying. Playing on both sides eventually fractures the psyche. It's not that Charlie hisses and smiles through the last episodes of the series, but it never seems completely defeated either. This is partly because of the very charming Pugh, who projects an unsinkable moxie, the kind of decisive skill of a woman able to anchor a franchise of action. She is only 22, the same age as Charlie, but she looks older, stronger, more stable, more confident. I found her extremely attractive and I can not wait to see her in all her activities (including Greta Gerwig's adaptation to Little woman), even if his mental health undermines the tension around the psychological torment of his character.

Pugh is helped in all this by the script. The series is surprisingly hard for Israelis (although far from being as difficult as the novel). The protagonists are working to stop a terrorist cell that considers innocent civilians as acceptable collateral damage, but Mossad agents, and in particular Kurtz, are deeply, grotesquely compromised, committed to achieving their goals, no matter the means. They favor targeted assassinations over bombing campaigns only in certain circumstances and only because they have the resources to distinguish between the two. There are only two somewhat stifled Palestinian characters, but although they are terrorists, they are not demonized and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stems largely from their perspective. The end of the series only promises that the escalation of the conflict will continue indefinitely, an endless war – and yet, by mitigating the psychic damage inflicted on Charlie, the series relieves those who did it. Things get even brighter with a final touch of romance that borders on fan service. Charlie's enduring thing for Gadi does not make much sense – but at the end of the series, I decided the best thing to do was to watch everything again, just to understand just how much.