Stranger than fact: Nabokov's "The Assistant Producer" and Rohmer's "Triple Agent"

It is a notori­ous, and notori­ously unre­solved, tale of espi­on­age: a one-time White Russian gen­er­al, in exile in Paris, con­nives with both the Soviets and the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Hoping to use a day out with his wife, once a pop­u­lar sing­er in her home­land, as his alibi, he slips away from her for a brief time, dur­ing which he over­sees the kid­nap­ping of anoth­er gen­er­al, his super­i­or at the White vet­er­an asso­ci­ation he belongs to. That gen­er­al is nev­er seen again. The triple agent, con­fron­ted with a note in which his vic­tim con­fides of mis­giv­ings about his col­league and the meet­ing he arranged, slips away from his would-be captors. He, too, is nev­er seen again. Seeking a scape­goat, the author­it­ies pounce on the agent’s wife, who is con­victed and dies in prison. 

When Vladimir Nabokov adap­ted the story of General Miller (the vic­tim), Nicholas Skobline (the agent), and Nadine Plevitskaia (the wife), for one of his short fic­tions, he actu­ally cast it in the form of a film, a melo­drama by turns flor­id and taw­dry and some­times rife with that qual­ity, poshlust, which Nabokov so beau­ti­fully elab­or­ates on in his study of of Gogol. (If you haven’t read that study, by all means do; in any case, for our pur­poses here, let’s say that poshlust stands for “aspir­a­tion­al kitsch.”) “Tonight we shall go to the movies,” its mys­ter­i­ous nar­rat­or of “The Assistant Producer” says at the begin­ning, before lav­ish­ing some rue­ful con­tempt on the sing­er he refers to as “La Slavska.”

“The pro­du­cer is a mere assist­ant because Russian his­tory has begot­ten a stream of B‑pictures that are in their way as dis­tor­ted as the mon­strous jokes per­pet­rated by Soviet revi­sion­ists,” the ever-astute Nabokovian Arthur Appel, Jr., notes in his won­der­ful book Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. Discussing the story’s cine­mat­ic ante­cedents and ana­logs, he notes that the story’s “bit play­ers are as accom­plished as Akim Tamiroff and Mischa Auer.” He men­tions Lewis Milestone’s The North Star, released in the same year that “The Assistant Producer” was pub­lished, 1943. For myself, Nabokov’s lit­er­ary mise-en-scene is rather evoc­at­ive of von Sternberg:

“And then, in tra­di­tion­al con­trast, pat comes a mighty burst of music and song with a rhythmic clap­ping of hands and stamp­ing of booted feet and we seen General Golubkov’s staff in full revelry—a lithe Georgian dan­cing with a dag­ger, the self-conscious sam­o­var reflect­ing dis­tor­ted faces, the Slavska throw­ing her head back with a throaty laugh, and the fat man of the corps, hor­ribly drunk, braided col­lar undone, greasy lips pursed for a bes­ti­al kiss, lean­ing across the table (close-up of an over­turned glass) to hug—nothingness, for wiry and per­fectly sober General Golubkov has deftly removed her and now, as they both stand facing the gang, says in a cold, clear voice: ‘Gentlemen, I want to present you my bride’—and in the stunned silence that fol­lows, a stray bul­let from out­side chances to shat­ter the dawn-blue win­dowpane, after which the roar of applause greets the glam­our­ous couple.”

There are no scenes of such vul­gar exuber­ance in Triple Agent, the ima­gin­ing of the Miller/Skobline/Plevitskaia affair that Eric Rohmer made in 2004. The Skobline fig­ure, here named Fiodor and played with oft-disturbing intens­ity by Serge Renko, is nev­er even seen in uni­form, let alone cel­eb­rat­ing with his troops. No, the film is set entirely in Paris, open­ing with the 1936 elec­tion of the Popular Front. It eschews action quite delib­er­ately; everything you might expect to see in a film with the title Triple Agent is left off screen. Which is not to say the film is without sus­pense, or a form of action. 

In per­haps the most cru­cial depar­ture from the known facts of the case, Rohmer com­pletely changes the wife’s iden­tity. Rather than a fel­low Russian, and a pop­u­lar sing­er of gypsy songs, Fiodor’s wife is a shy, beau­ti­ful paint­er of Greek ori­gin named Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou). Not very much seems to hap­pen in the film’s first quarter. Arsinoé makes the acquaint­ance of the couple upstairs, who are Communists; she and Fiodor and the neigh­bors have some intriguing con­ver­sa­tions about art and polit­ics, and fig­ur­at­ive versus abstract art. These don’t move the plot along a bit, but con­trib­ute a res­on­ant them­at­ic ele­ment. We are giv­en the impres­sion that Fiodor and Arsinoé have a rel­at­ively quiet life, but are pas­sion­ately attached to each oth­er. But as polit­ic­al events ramp up, Fiodor’s per­versity begins to reveal itself. His alle­gi­ances seem to be all over the place, and when it’s poin­ted out to him, he launches elab­or­ately impro­vised self-justifications. And when he’s not doing that, he almost waxes smug about his dupli­city. At a lunch with a cous­in, a former Russian roy­al look­ing for work with Fiodor’s organ­iz­a­tion, and right in front of his wife, he taunts the young man: “Sometimes it’s wiser to be truth­ful than to lie, so you won’t be believed. Don’t you believe me?” And then fixes on him the gaze that we see in the screen cap at top.

Then fol­lows one of the most extraordin­ary series of shots in Rohmer. Not at all known for quick cut­ting, he almost jumps from the medi­um clos­eup at top to the one below, and then cuts three more times in less than five seconds, thusly: 

“Can’t you decide?” he asks his wife, coldly. The quick cuts work like a glass of cold water thrown in one’s face; it’s a turn­ing point in the film, and in the char­ac­ters’ mar­riage. By the time the cli­max is at hand, Fiodor has got Arsinoé so con­fused that she breaks down in tears of joy when he emphat­ic­ally tells her that he’s not a Nazi. And he’s not, prob­ably. But what is he, exactly. Against a back­drop of polit­ic­al intrigue, Rohmer presents a mor­al tale of how people make them­selves unknow­able not only to each oth­er but to themselves. 

Nabokov, on the oth­er hand, exam­ines role-playing, and, as always, the gap between real­ity and per­cep­tion, and wrings a pecu­li­ar poignancy out of a scen­ario into which he has injec­ted very little of what you might call the “human ele­ment.” “The story bril­liantly inverts life and art,” observes Nabokov bio­graph­er Brian Boyd, “[E]vents appear to be pur­loined from movie­land, but in fact come straight from life—which itself seems to have imit­ated bad art.”

“If ‘his­tory’ means ‘a writ­ten account of events’…then let us inquire who actually—what scribes, what secretaries—took it down and how qual­i­fied they were for the job,” Nabokov said in an inter­view with Phillip Oakes in 1969. “The Assistant Producer” serves up “his­tory” twice removed, not just as a movie, but as a Hollywood movie (as La Slavska arrives at Golubkov’s camp, the audi­ence is shown “a plain littered with bod­ies some­where in Ventura County) out of Nabokov’s ima­gin­a­tion. It was the first short story he wrote in English, three years after com­ing to America from Paris…where he had been a neigh­bor of General Miller.