I'm currently reading a selection of the letters of John Le Carré, edited by his son, Tim Cornwell, who according to the various dedications by his siblings died as well shortly after completing said edition. Unsurprisngly, Le Carré was good with letter writing, though better so the older he got, or perhaps it's that the targets of his praise and rage align more with this particular reader's in the last few decades than early on? But I think it's also that early on it feels like he's trying, there's a bit of a mannered quality, whereas later on the letters feel much more natural. Comparing the letters to his collection of autobiographical essays, what I was missing there - material on his relationships with his siblings and his two wives - is definitely there in the letters. Editing wise, it's worth noting that Tim Cornwell inclludes some samples of where his father does not come out looking good (two words: Salman Rushdie) as well as letters that showcase insight and prescience. Several of the ones the editor tells me were German in the original make me wish there will be an original language edition, because I'm wildly curious how those sentences read there. (Literature-wise, Smiley's work on the 17th century German poets not withstanding, I note Le Carré's passion for our a literature is a very 19th century one; the only 20th century author who ges mentioned (in passing) is Thomas Mann, whereas all the adoration goes to the gents (and only male authors are listed) from the 1800s. Also he keeps spelling Joghurt the German way, with a j not a y like in English, which is somehow endearing, and Tim Cornwell provides us with this early footnote :

A letter to von Almen from Oxford is litettered with references to the writers le Carré studied in four years of German literature, Goethe prominent among them. IN 2020 he named the 'greatest film of my life': the Faustian drama Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, based on the novel by Klaus Mann and sarring Klalus Maria Brandauer as a German actor who traded integrity for fame under the Nazis. Fans have speculated on th source of le Carré's pen name - with little result, as he usually claimed to have forgotten it. The nineteenth- century French auhtor Michel Carré wrote the libretto for Gounoud's opera Fauast, raising the slim possibility of a Goethe connection.

Right then. In 2000, Le Carré almost was on the British show Desert Island Discs but withdrew before it could happen with apologies to Sue Lawley: You will be vound to ask me a series of subjects which I don't want to discuss. These are childhood, fathers, spying, Salman Rushdie, Stella Rimington's book, (...) and the other one, 'what have you got to write about now the Cold War's over?" which drives me t near dementia. So I don't really think I'm your man. :Do you?. She agreed. However, he hiad made a selection of records already, which Tim Cornwell shares with us. So, here's John Le Carré's playlist for his own life:

Crazy Gang - Underneath the Arches (Ronnie and all that)
Noel Coward - Mrs. Wentworth-Browster ('A bar on the Piccola Marina')
Alec Guinness reading 'Four Quartets' - studious period
Fischer-Dieskau - Schubert songs? The trout?
Sibelius - PINE FOREST
Alfie Brendel on the joanna - I hear it as a dialogue... conversation...Beethoven
Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Diminitis from Tinker Tailor
Other: a burst of zither music from The Third Man - at the risk of being banal
Über allen Gipfen ist Ruh, etc. - Goethe

(In case you're wondering: Ronnie was Le Carré's con man father and "Underneath the Arches" was used in the tv version of A Perfect Spy (aka the Le Carré novel where his father has an overt alter ego). "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh" is one of Goethe's shortest and most perfect poems, otherwise known as "Wanderer's Nachtlied", and yes, it is essentially about death. There are various musical settings, including one by Schubert, but I imagine he wanted it recited, because it's nearly untranslatable precisely because of the sound effect:

Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh',
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

Okay, and now here are some quotes from the letters. On the three actors who played Smiley:

"I'm the worst judge, thanks to Alec Guinness. His voice was so beguiling, on stage, radio or across the fire that it's preinted into my head as The One. WHich is silly of me; because I secretly thought Gary Oldman was the better Smiley, and Simon RB the better voice, more naturalistic and impassioned."

(By email to Simon Prince on 5 April 2020, comparing Smileys (Alec Guinnes (tv) vs Gary Oldman (film) vs Simon Russell Beale (radio))

He did have to woo Alec Guiness into playing Smiley at first, starting thusly:


Dear Sir Alec,

I write to you as an unbounded admirer of your work for many years (...) Already we are all of us agreed on one thing that if we were to cry for the moon, we would cry for Guinness as Smiley, and build everything else to fit.

And then, when Guiness objected that was too old and didn't fit the physical description given of Smiley in the novels at all:

Let me get straight to your points. 64 is the ideal age. Smiley can't be less, arithmetically, and I fear he may be more, though I have deliberately arrested the passage of time in the later books. So nobody is at all worried on that score, and you must not be either. (...)
No, you are not rotund or double chinned, though I think I have seen you in roles where you have, almost as an act of will, acquired a sort of cherubic look! Let me answer this question together with your point about Arthur Lowe, because, speaking personally, they enable me to say why I at least see you as the ideal Smiley.
Apart from plumbness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes - when you wish it - to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worres about you. I don't know what you call that kind of empathy but it's very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it; when either of you gets his feet wet, I can't help shivering.

Which is a great description of some key Alec Guinness qualities as an actor, wouldn't you say?

More praise, this time to Tom Stoppard for his script for Shakespeare in Love:

Dear Tom, 4. February 1999

I loved 'Shakespeare in lLove', & loved your for writing it. It will last & last, my children & grandchildren already love it, it's one of those perfect, lighthearted, prfound works of art that actuall increase the public's awareness of its own cultural heritage. Very pompous of me, but true. And at the personal leve, it was like ak ind of doting Stoppard soliloquy on a balmy summer's afternoon, all wit & affection & musing. I identified most naturally with Webster, of course, who was surely one of youor most delicious conceits. Just wonderful. All, all wonderful -
Ever,

David.

(John Webster was the bloodthirsty little boy feeding a live mouse to a cat in the film, and a great literary in-joke on Stoppard's and now on Le Carré's part, as Webster was the most gory of Jacobean playwrights.)

On to the rants. On the Orange Menace and Brexit, to Nicholas Shakespeare, December 16th 2016:

Betweenwhiles, I can hardly believe the depths to which the US is about to sink, or has sunk already. Our supposed great ally is a rogue state run by a thin-skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac - I forgot narcissistic - & we miust never imagine he has a rational, temperate nature underneath the skin, & we must never forget how he came to power, to reminiscent of Our Dear Führer in so many ways that it dries the mouth.
Brexit? An act of economic suicide monted by charlatans, but ultimately inoperable & retrievable in fact if not in name. Or so I hope. Meanwhile, planned penury for the huge underclass.

Evidently Le Carré, being THE spy novelist, was asked whether or not he thought Trump was a Russian asset, as he wrote in reply to to William Burroughs, 23 July 2018:

Welll, I would be puzzled to know, if I were in Putin's position, how to run Donald Trump as my asset. I have no doubt that htey have obtained him, and they could probably blow him out of the water whenever they felt like it, but I htink they are having much more fun feeding his contradictions and contributing to the chaos. The terrifying thing is, the closer he draws to Putin, the more he lies and denies, the stronger his support among the faithful. You don't need to own Trump as an agent. You just have to let him run.

Verily. He also makes repeated mince meat of Boris Johnson ("Cowardice & bullying go hand in hand, & Johnson is a practioner of both"). As Le Carré and his wife Jane were among the people not allowed to be in the same room as he was dying of pneumonia in the winter of the first Covid year, 2020, despite her being in the same hospital for her cancer treatment, while Johson was partying at Downing Street, I hope his children got some satisfaction out of printing these disses.

All in all: very readable, very quotable.

As the Orange Menace in the US runs out of ways to lose the election (how many times was that by now, counting all the law suits, 50?) but damage his country that much further, his cousin-in-malice-and-bad-hair keeps piling up ways to make satirists weep because they'd never get away with this stuff if they'd invented it. Gunships against French fishermen? Trying divide and conquer with Merkel and Macron and feeling insulted the two respond exactly as they did every time in the last four years a Brit tried this, by pointing out the EU negotiates as a block and not via individual members? And then there's the tale of Johnson during his dinner with Ursula von der Leyen "joking" that hey, English and German people knew how difficult the French could be, heh, heh, heh. She wasn't amused. See, in fiction, villains as successful as Johnson are supposed to have come competency and at least some ability to read the room they're in.

Not unrelatedly, and with my mind still on the late John le Carré, have two scenes from the film version of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold: Richard Burton, Oskar Werner, and Claire Bloom (in the second one):







And here's Philip Seymour Hoffmann in his last role in A Most Wanted Man. You can immediately see he's Richard Burton's grandson, so to speak:

makamu wanted to know my favourite text dealing with spies other than The Americans, and I’m torn. On the one hand, I have a continuing deep fondness for the tv show Alias, and not just because it has one of my all time favourite characters in it (as a villain/occasional ally), Arvin Sloane. I like most of the ensemble, even the two seasons I have fundamental issues with (3 and 5) also contain elements I really like (the third season has some of the best Bristows (both Sydney and Jack)/Sloane scenes in them, the fifth remains the only example of a show I can spontanously think of where the fact that the leading actress got pregnant was written into the storyline in a way that really worked with the character she played, didn’t take from her agency one bit, and advanced the show’s general themes. As has said by someone other than me first, Alias is at its heart a twisted family romance, and Sydney’s complicated relationship with her parents is at its core, so for her to, in the final season, become a parent herself (and also a mentor of a younger agent, which allowed the show to keep Sydney involved with its trademark action scenes – via mentoring and comm link – in the months when Jennifer Garner wasn’t capable of participating in them physically) really brought things full circle.

But still, Alias isn‘>t my choice here. Nor are Bond movies – any Bond – which I have a soft spot for as well, and in a few cases outright love. But they’re not my favourites. No, my favourite is a book. Not a Le Carré novel, much as I appreciate the tropes he brought to the genre, several of his characters, and a great many of his positions. (I don’t know what it is that keeps me going from like to love with Le Carré’s books, with the arguable exception of his collection of autobiographical essays, The Pidgeon Tunnel.

My very favourite text that deals with spies is the novel Es muß nicht immer Kaviar sein („It doesn’t have to be caviar“) by Johannes Mario Simmel. It wasn’t his first novel, but it was the one which made him famous and remained one of his most popular novels when he was a bestselling writer in the German-reading world for decades. And it’s both a spoof of the spy genre and a witty entry in it, not to mention a neat take on the Schelmenroman, „trickster novel“. Does it have flaws? You bet. Despite it’s late 1930s – 50s setting, it’s very much a 1960s novel in terms of gender depiction, with our hero being irresistable to women and most of the female characters being all emotion. (The novel's hero isn't a hypocrite about his lack of monogamy, though; when he finds out his girlfriend at a time also has an affair with another guy and wants to keep them both, he goes with it.) Also, while Simmel himself was as anti-Nazi as you can get (his father was Jewish, and most of his paternal family was murdered as a result) and in his more serious novels often uses rich West German or Austrian industrialists as villains who have a bloody Nazi past, you could argue that the way he allows his trickster hero, Thomas Lieven, to avoid getting blood on his hands even when he’s temporarily forced to work for a branch of the German secret service (not the Gestapo) is cheating.

All this being said, I still adore this novel. Why? Because it’s hilarious, deeply humanist and committed to its pacifism. Our hero, Thomas Lieven, starts out as a German banker (of a private bank) working in London (he left Germany just before the Weimar Republic ended), fond of good food (he’s a passionate hobby cook) and women. When he’s tricked by his evil compagnon into going back to Germany under a pretense, the plot is set in motion, as his partner has framed Thomas who ends up arrested, told he only can avoid prison if he agrees to go back as a spy, then, as soon as he is back in England and reports just this, disbelieved and forcibly recruited as well, and when he’s taking off to France to avoid spying for either nation, he only can stay there for a few months before the French secret service who believes that with two secret services after him, he really must be hot stuff as an agent, forcibly recruits him as well. And that’s before WWII starts, at which point our hero decides that if he wants to make it out of this madness alive, he really has to be one step ahead of each secret service. The fun of the novel lies in Thomas outfoxing each secret service (well, most of the time; each at some point gets a hold of him for longer, too), seducing and persuading people not by using weapons (he actually does manage to avoid killing anyone, of any nation, though there’s one occasion where he realises that his actions have enabled others to kill), but by his cooking skills, charm and wit. In between, Simmel provides us with heist plots, code decyphering, double and triple identity adventures, prison breakouts, recipes printed in full which infected a lot of the novel’s readers with the urge to cook (including my teenage dad, who drove his mother crazy by insisting to prepare a salad a la Thomas Lieven), lots of suspense and a hero whose conviction to survive is only matched by his determination not to kill other people, including those who try to kill him. (He’s fine with screwing them over and/or landing them in prison, though.)

Simmel includes some historical characters – for example Josephine Baker, whom Thomas is appropriately smitten by and awed of, and who saves his hide at one point after the Deuxieme Bureau, having tricked by him twice, really wants to kill him -, but most are fictional. The various upper hierarchy spy handlers, be they English, German, French or American, pre, during or post war, tend to be depicted as a neurotic, self-important bunch whom one is not sorry to see conned. (Though you can tell our author likes the French best because the French spies more often than not have a sense of humor while the others do not.) (Oh, and the scene where Thomas gets trained as a secret agent is a great spoof of toughing-up-the-hero-montage scenes in its own right, not least because what he learns is not what his trainer wants him to learn but the opposite. For example, they want him to renember his cover identity when suddenly woken up at night, but but he learns is to use ear plugs; instead of learning to make a meal out of mice when sent into a survival camp, he thinks ahead and smuggles delicous food with him, and so forth.)

There was a German movie version which I never watched much of because it was a let down from the start, with Thomas changed into a naive innocent stumbling around instead of a trickster planning his cons deliberately (that’s German 60s cinema for you), but not an English language one, despite the novel making such a big splash when it first got published and remaining an enduring bestseller, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. The very premise goes against every Anglo-American WWII era pop culture cliché, and even if Thomas Lieven was changed from a German living in Britain to an actual Brit (or American), that would still be true. Also it wouldn’t work. Take the part where he for plot reasons gets a list of various Allied agents and their contact passwords in his possession. That he doesn’t want the Gestapo to end up with the list is a given, but he doesn’t want to hand it over to either the French (whose list it originally was) or the English, either, because, as the narration tells us, it’s not Hitler who would get killed if he did, but a lot of his countrymen. So he provides representatives of all three secret services with faked lists while destroying the original one. If you want to argue that pacifism, great cooking and refusals to kill don’t defeat brutal dictatorships, I’m with you, but I still like that this fictional person stuck to his not-guns in this enduringly entertaining favourite text of mine dealing with spies.

The other days

Which is a not-really-memoir, a collection of autobiographical stories, several of which have been earlier published, here arranged not in linear order but thematically, in a way. Le Carré puts himself in the observer role in most of the stories, which are focused on the various people, famous or not, he encounters. For all that he's a superb raconteur about them, he keeps his own emotions about the people he describes mostly in check; understatement is the name of the game. The big exception, and unsurprisingly the chapter that got the most attention in reviews when this book was published, comes near the end, in the tale of his dastardly conman of a father, Ronnie, a born life ruiner (and occasional beater, but the devastating damage Ronnie does both to marks and to his family is usually non-physical in nature), and his absent mother Olive, who left him and his brother with Ronnie when our author was five and whom when reencountering her as an adult he never quite managed to form a relationship with, not least due to her habit of addressing him as Ronnie. Lé Carré is far too self aware not to realise the connection between spying, being a conman, and being a writer, and thus warns the reader early on, re: veracity of the stories he's about to tell:


““I’m a liar . . .Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.”

Ronnie and Olive remind me a lot of Charles Dickens' parents, for all that Dickens and Le Carré aren't really much alike as writers; the parallel extends to adult Dickens' senior embarassing his son by writing out cheques in his name till Charles had to publish an advertisement in the papers to say he wasn't countenancing this, while Ronnie uses his son's novelist successs in a similar manner (and even signs the novels), to the novelist sons putting their fathers in more bearable form in novels while in rl living in an uneasy tension between trying to avoid their fathers and being unable to let them go. While carrying a less obvious but as deep-seated grudge against their mothers due to what they see as an utter lack of affection. Le Carré's terse description of Olive as the mother without a scent (he can't remember what she smelled like because she never hugged him) says it all.

But the Ronnie (and Olive) chapter comes, as mentioned, near the end of the book; Le Carré knew of course it was the most emotional and the climax. Earlier, we're treated wrily and drolly to such gems as lunch with Rupert Murdoch (who wanted to know who killed Robert Maxwell) being his over the top tycoon self, Alec Guinness, whom Le Carré befriended due to Smiley, being as gentlemanly and enigmatic as you want him to have been, with the occasional one liner to his fellow actors when they go over the top, Yassir Arafat putting on a show (in more senses than one) while Le Carré is busy roleplaying himself as Charlie, the herone of Litlte Drummer Girl, and so forth. Of particular interest to me and a red thread through the book is Le Carré's life long fascination with all things German. He was stationed in Bonn in the 50s, is fluent in the language (and says these days he can't focus on a book for longer than an hour, except if it's in German), keeps coming back here and provides German locations as guest spots in many of his novels. His descriptions of the many, many old Nazis on all levels of the administration in the 50s and 60s is dead-on, I'm afraid. (Just recently, our justice department published a study on how many former Nazis were there in the post war justice system until the 70s. Over 77 percent, I kid you not. Even allowing for the usual argument (which is: well, non-Nazi German lawyers and judges were hard to come by in the 1950s; not untrue, but there were the emigrés, who found it harder, not easier, than the Nazis to get those kind of jobs if they were willing to return, plus there was no encouragement of the younger, less tainted generation), that's devastatingly high. As for the reformed spy network, you probably had to search for a non-former Nazi with a flashlight. Le Carré's description of Gehlen, who founded it and got the US licence for it is wickedly on point. He also can't resist some sarcasm re: the US and British attitude, which was as he sums up that as a Nazi, you were per definition not a Communist, and so okay in the Cold War era CIA's book. (Ignoring that Gehlen was a fantasist and that having a dark past makes you easily availablef or blackmail,with the end result that according to Le Carré 90 % of the German agents working in Eastern Europe were really working for the Stasi. Which I'm completely ready to believe. Competence isn't something the BND was ever famous for, even after the Nazis died out. In an account of a more recent German episode, he maks me cringe because that one concerns the German citizen tortured at Guantanamo, and I remember the (non-)reaction from our governments all too well.

Like Le Carré's novels, The Pigeon Tunnel features far more men than women, though the occasional memorable woman makes it through, like Yvonne, the original for Tessa in The Constant Gardener. Someone I'd like to have read about more is his younger half sister Charlotte Cornwell, who inspired Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl and who, since she's an actress, he wanted to play the character in the movie version, which didn't happen. (Not a fan of Diane Keaton he.) Unfortunately with the exception of saying this about Charlie, he doesn't talk about her, or his other siblings really, other than saying his brother Tony was basically his only source of affection in his childhood (Ronnie and Olive weren't). Various ladies with the designation "my wife" are spotted at the edges of these stories, but as I said, for the most part, Le Carré manages to remain deepy private in this collection, taking the not unreasonable position that describing all these other people is where his and the readers' interests allign.

All in all: highly readable, and no, you don't have to be into his novels to enjoy it.

We'll never know how this film would come across without the audience knowledge that its leading actor is dead. At a guess, it would be seen as well done if not innovative Le Carré, with Seymour delivering a great central performance, and there would be more attenton in the reviews to the fact this movie - which I saw yesterday, and at some point the irony of the date occured to me - , in its criticism of the secret services in a post 9/11 world already feels old fashioned, and yet also timeless. (The novel I understand was very specific about being set in the Bush era and in the early years of same to boot; the movie carefully removes all dates except it being post 9/11 and thus could be present day. In fact, there is one tiny hint in the dialogue to hint it may be, more about this in a moment.) Because there is no waterboarding scene, no NSA listening in to everyone's private conversations, no Jack Bauer type of antics; the spy methods used for the most part could be straight from the 1970s, those tropes Le Carré practically invented and which were endlessly copied thereafter: cultivating assets, getting people to commit deep betrayals with a mixture of carefully applied emotional understanding and awful pressure, passing secret messages in cigarette cases - the fact that our main character smokes constantly, even, when in film and tv world no one not clearly marked as a villain does that anymore in a non-period piece -, tailing someone in person (instead of letting technology do it for you), escaping a pursuer via a quick in and out of a subway train.

I say for the most part, because one of the movie's themes is of course the clash between Seymour Hoffman's character Günther Bachmann's idea of spying, which involves all of the above, and the post 9/11 need to produce quick and flashy results to impress the populace without thinking through long term consequences. Le Carré, in interviews and novels, never made a secret out of his deep disdain for the current day modus operandi. And yet it's hard to think of his 1960s and 1970s novels (and the tv show and movies made out of same) as presenting the secret service work then being in some sort of bloom, rather than a constant exercise in moral compromises (at best) and betrayals (more likely), where sooner or later, trying to do if not the right than the more right feeling thing is going to get you screwed over, most probably by the institution you serve rather than your open enemies. (And of course the visual shabbiness was a deliberate counterpoint to the James Bond style glamour which pre-Le Carré had been the most popular idea of spying in pop culture.) Plus ca change: decades later, in A Most Wanted Man, this is still the case.

What is strikingly different, though (in terms of Le Carré based films, not novels), is the location (Hamburg, with two brief detours to Berlin, and the film was actually shot on location, using German actors except for PSH, William Dafoe, Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright) and the fact there's not a Brit in sight, either as an actor nor as a character. (One of the reviews I read mentioned there were British characters in the book but so minor they could be cut. Not having read this particular Le Carré novel, I wouldn't know.) Now Le Carré as a young man had been stationed in Germany for a while (which led among other thing sto the hilarious characterisation of Bonn as "half the size of the central cemetery in Chicago and twice as dead" - now that's just mean, Mr. Cornwall), and German locations pop up frequently in his books, though usually not as the sole place of the action. The director, Anton Corbijin, knows his Hamburg as well, and thus you don't get any establishing tourist shots, though the cinematography dwells on the stark differences between the immigrant and asylum seekers inhabited houses and the villas of the rich. Moreover, the sole American in sight is Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright's character - the other three American actors play Germans), who, since she's the CIA's representative in a Le Carré based story it's no spoiler to say is not a heroine, and at any rate only has a supporting role with not that much screentime), so the fim is that rarity, an international movie shot and located in Germany with German characters - and not a single Nazi among them. Nor is anyone dealing with their Nazi granddad. No one is clicking their heels, either, nor has an aristocratic name. And while everyone talks English with a German accent (which is a movie and tv convention I've been complaining about before), I don't mind because the rest feels so authentic that I had no trouble suspending my disbelief. Not least because Hoffman clicks with his German support team, the most prominent members of which are played by Nina Hoss and Daniel Brühl (mind you, Brühl's role is a silent one, which is a shame but otoh that means Nina Hoss gets all the bantery dialogue as Bachmann's sidekick Erna Frey, and she delivers it so well, and it's still so rare that the bantery sidekick/second-in-command is female that I don't mind), in a way that makes me entirely believe they're all from the same background wile I'm watching.

The Muslim characters, Bachmann's asset Jamal (with whom he has classic Le Carré handler/agent meetings involving male affection mingled with betrayal), who is played by Mehdi Dehbi), the iman suspected of financing terrorism, Dr. Feisal Abdullah (played by Hamouyan Ershadi), the Chechnyan-Russian wanted man of the title, Issa Karpov (played by Grigoriy Dobrygin) and the Turkish mother and son who offer him sanctuary for a while are what the Russian/insert other Eastern block nation characters would have been in a 1960s/1970s novel, which means they're presented as more sympathetic than the soulless bureaucrats from the upper level of the German secret service. (Bachmann and his ground team are sympathetic. Higher level scret service guys never are.) As mentioned, there is no waterboarding scene, but at one point we see the back of Issa Karpov who has been tortured in Chechnya and Turkey, and it's as gruesomely scar scarred that it says it all. There is an obvious present day irony in the fact that the intel declaring Karpov a terrorist comes from the Russians who "interrogated" him; the film doesn't include expositionary dialogue about how post 9/11 Putin's behavior in Chevnya was overlooked/approved by the US because hey, Muslim terrorists, as opposed to now, but the Ukraine probably wasn't an issue the general public was aware yet when the film was shot, so it might not have been intended. This also made me originally conclude the film was set in 2002/3 or thereabouts until Bachmann and Martha Sullivan had an exchange in which she said "we don't do that anymore" ("that" being what the Bushites so euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation" as well as one way tickets to Guantanamo without bothering with legal niceties) and Bachmann retorts, "no, you want us to do it", which sounds more like an Obama era dialogue. But the movie doesn't say for good one way or the other.

Female characters: several - Karpov's idealistic lawyer, Annabel Richter, Bachman's second in command Erna Frey, Martha Sullivan and Leyla, the middleaged Turkish lady who gives Karpov shelter for a while. There is no literal Bechdel test passing (Annabel and Erna talk in a scene, but the subject is Karpov, which isn't suprising considering why they're in the same place to begin with), but I'd say the story treats them as it does the male characters. (If Annabel is a bit one dimensionally good and naive in a shady world, so is Issa Karpov.)

Still, the movie would remain in the well made but not spectacular spy film category were it not for Philip Seymour Hoffman's central performance. Günther Bachmann (whose name has two things usually hard for Anglosaxons, an Umlaut, ü, and a ch, and to the American actors' credit they do a good job on them) as the chainsmoking, drinking, clever morally ambiguous spymaster is his type of role. He can switch on the understanding, sympathetic fatherly attitude as well as the hardcore bullying one, the sly humor as well as the existential doubts (for which he doesn't need monologues, just facial expression). It's also impossible not to read the awareness of it being his last leading role into it, because there is a rage, rage against the dying of the light element there on both the Watsonian and Doylist level (Bachman and his traditional spy methods versus the glitzy "results now, or do you want another 9/11?" current day world). You watch him talk with Annabel Richter about trying to get rid of habits and fish out yet another cigarette with slightly trembling fingers, and of course you are aware how he died. And he exits the movie in a way that reminds me of River Phoenix at the end of Stand By Me; something that already works with the actor alive on an Watsonian, in-story level, but doubly so with the actor dead. ( Spoilery explanation ensues. ) And that feels as gut wrenching as in the Stand Bye Me/River Phoenix case.

Lastly, trivia for non-Germans: the film's music was composed by Herbert Gröhnemeyer, who also has a cameo role as one of Bachmann's superiors; an international audience might recall his young self playing Leutnant Werner in Das Boot. He's one of our most famous pop musicians. Martin Bock, who plays Bachmann's boo-hiss competition within the secret service became better known abroad playing the doctor in Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band. I don't think Nina Hoss has been in anything internationally seen yet, but am sure this will change now, because she's really good in this film (which takes some doing if most of your scenes are next to Philip Seymour Hoffman).