Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 5 September

The Little Drummer Girl (Park, 2018) is streaming on ThreeNow

I’ve been mean­ing to recom­mend this one here, or on my reg­u­lar weekly slot on Nights at RNZ National, but every time I think I’ve nailed down where it’s avail­able, it disappears.

Now, I can con­firm that The Little Drummer Girl has landed at ThreeNow1 where you can absorb it all for free.

I’m always a suck­er for a le Carré adapt­a­tion and this six-part 2018 BBC ver­sion of a 1983 nov­el – already adap­ted for the big screen in 1984 as a vehicle for Diane Keaton – really hits the spot.

Obviously, you’ve got le Carré’s usu­al com­bin­a­tion of char­ac­ters with mixed or con­flic­ted motives, oper­at­ing in a milieu where noth­ing is quite as it seems but the stakes are awfully high, but here we can add the sat­is­fy­ing extra space allowed by a TV series and a cast from heav­en: Michael Shannon as a ruth­less Mossad spy chief, Alexander Skarsgård coach­ing and then fall­ing in love with (or is he?) the young English act­ress Charlie, my first exper­i­ence of the geni­us that is Florence Pugh.

Le Carré’s fas­cin­a­tion with con artists, phil­an­der­ers, fabulists and fib­bers of all kinds is in top gear here. Shannon’s Kurtz hav­ing to check which name and glasses he’s sup­posed to be wear­ing before every meet­ing; Gaddi (Skarsgård) play­ing the part of ter­ror­ist Khalil and his young­er broth­er Salim so effect­ively that Charlie – and the audi­ence – has to stop and take stock every so often and ask, hold on – who was he then?

And then there is Pugh as Charlie – charm­ingly impugn­ing the repu­ta­tion of act­ors every­where as rogues not to be trus­ted. At one point she con­vin­cingly spins a yarn about her con-man fath­er dying in pris­on – a story plucked straight from le Carré’s own life.

(From my review at RNZ Widescreen)

Most inter­est­ing to film buffs is that The Little Drummer Girl is dir­ec­ted by Park Chan-wook, whose Decision to Leave blew fest­iv­al audi­ences away last year and his 2003 mas­ter­piece Oldboy has just been giv­en a 20^th anniversary remas­ter and rerelease.