THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL: Park Chan-wook’s Superb Spy Series

All quiet on the western front. We are living in a terminal age. We are growing old. Our culture is a culture of identical bacteria reproducing en masse. Our art is the art of generating as much money or as many festival awards as possible. Nothing has changed since the time when Fellini caustically summed up the West in La Dolce Vita – we are bored. In pop culture, reboots, sequels, remakes, and spin-offs reign. In high culture, postmodernism still rules. A salutary injection of fresh blood seems to be globalization: in search of invigorating cinematic experiences, we are increasingly venturing beyond the familiar bounds of Western culture.

One of the true discoveries of recent years for the West has been, among others, Korean cinematography. But what will happen when Korea comes to Europe? A miniseries co-produced by AMC and the BBC, directed by Park Chan-wook, The Little Drummer Girl. How did this cultural transfer turn out?

The Korean director takes as his subject the classic spy novel by the British writer John le Carré – The Little Drummer Girl. The book had already been adapted for the screen, with Diane Keaton in the lead role, but the film was met with rather lukewarm reception: the filmmakers failed to handle the selection of extensive and complicated source material.

Park returned to the novel more than thirty years later, and the whole story seems tailor-made for the inhabitants of the global village: it deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, centers on an Englishwoman and a German of Jewish descent, and is set in the 1970s across various countries—from Yugoslavia and Greece to West Germany and Israel. And in the A.D. 2018 version, a Korean director is added to the mix.

Western culture has fascinated Park for years – he is an erudite, a citizen of the world, and by training a philosopher.

However, whereas in the American Stoker he created an original, peculiar microcosm that did not have to exist specifically in the United States, and where the literature of the Marquise de Sade behind The Handmaiden did not dominate the Korean-ness of that work, The Little Drummer Girl is a story deeply rooted in European realities and demanding an excellent understanding of the specific geopolitical situation. Park is aware of this and painstakingly reconstructs a world that is foreign to him: in this meticulousness there is something both of a childlike enthusiasm for exploring an exotic culture and an underlying fear of a foreigner who wants to be perceived by the locals as one of them.

What is his newest work about? We move to Germany divided by the Wall at the end of the 1970s. All across Europe, the bombings by freedom fighters for Palestine grow louder. Agents of Israeli intelligence—Mossad—catch wind of the brilliant mind behind some of these attacks: Khalil. They devise a plan to infiltrate his group, for which they need one small detail: an attractive European woman. To that end, they deceitfully recruit a young British actress, Charlie, into their ranks. She will play her role of a lifetime for them, co-creating a great illusion…

Whether or not it is her role of a lifetime, the twenty-two-year-old Florence Pugh delivers perhaps the best performance of her career. Plump, sturdy, tough, and energetic, Charlie never ceases to capture our interest – she is an exceptionally engaging character. At first, this cocky young woman may irritate slightly, but in the end the young actress achieves something remarkable: the viewer genuinely cares about her fate. Together with Charlie, we feel the weight of each increasingly serious choice. Michael Shannon, with his heavy German accent, portrays the head of the Mossad operations unit, creating an equally unforgettable character who horrifies us in one scene with his calculated cruelty and evokes pity in the next.

In turn, the cold, withdrawn Alexander Skarsgård fits perfectly the role of the former soldier—a combat machine trained to follow orders without question. Only in his eyes can we discern that the affection he feigns toward Charlie begins to transcend the fictitious purposes of the operation.

Certainly there will be viewers for whom this is a tedious watch. It is more a six-hour film than a series—without cheap cliffhangers, but with trust in the viewer who is ready to focus entirely on the story being told. Park wants us to trust him—his tale will not immediately draw us in and sweep us away. It develops slowly, and its exposition is long, practically occupying the first two episodes. If the beginning bores you, do not be discouraged. The action builds gradually and gains momentum: with Asian patience, like a snowball growing in volume with each turn.

Fans of Park expecting another film “more Tarantino-esque than anything Tarantino ever made” may also be disappointed. Park does not rest on his laurels but consistently expands his cinematic repertoire – he offers the audience a classic and deliberately non-modern story. He places at its center pure storytelling and convincing characters, not formal gimmicks – although from beginning to end the form remains artfully crafted, each frame a painterly tableau. Perhaps there is a bit too little Park in Park, but his presence behind the camera is constantly palpable.

Even the beautiful, almost poetic opening credits foreshadow the refinement to which the Asian director has accustomed us. We see his hand in masterful scenes: exquisitely filmed (the Acropolis), moving (the conversation with the sister of a fallen fighter), and charged with tension (the shot of the Swedish assassin).

Park does not forget his peculiar sense of humor, which he sometimes uses to defuse downright grim situations—such as in an interrogation scene when the electricity suddenly goes out and the kidnappers must solve this mundane problem. Above all, however, Park is interested in the same things that fascinated him in his earlier works. From a classic spy story laced with romance, he creates a tale about the theatre of life, about the instability of identity and the paper-thin nature of our characters, about the conventionality of social roles and the insidious falsity of the self: he continues the grand themes from The Handmaiden that preceded The Little Drummer Girl, once again telling the story of a woman whose life becomes a stage.

On a self-referential level, it is also a denunciation of the very artifice of art and film, which is after all the creation of false realities, the crafting of illusions, the seduction of the viewer.

The challenge was double: the Korean had not only to interpret a European popular-literature classic and face the legend of a British writer but also to adapt his—admittedly highly eccentric—style to the requirements of public television. From these necessary compromises the artist emerges victorious.

He proves that he is among the world’s top directors, because even when he foregoes the hallmarks of his style, he can create something beautiful. Park knows the craft of filmmaking outrageously well, and his concern for the final effect outweighs ego and the desire to flaunt his developed stylistic signature. No, nobody eats octopus here, nobody cuts off their tongue with scissors, nor do we see naturalistic scenes of lesbian sex or masturbation in the shower after the first committed murder—and yet more than once we will be sitting on the edge of our seats.

The author of the original novel, John le Carré, was a real agent of British intelligence. His account of the realities of that profession is not authorial fantasy but the result of authentic, deeply lived events.

Park remains faithful to the original, highlighting the psychological and physical costs of being a spy, as well as the cold ruthlessness with which intelligence services must operate to do their job effectively. Although the main characters work for Mossad, the series does not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides have their reasons, but nobody here is in the right. It is an enchanted circle of death, conspiracy, and violence. Yet Palestinian terrorists do not appear merely as fanatics, because The Little Drummer Girl devotes sufficient time to presenting their reality and historical conditions. But Park can also look closely at us Europeans, for example by having one of the Palestinians say:

When I first came to Europe, you know what surprised me the most? Nobody cares about anything here.

The whole thing reminds me very much of one of my favorite films, The Day of the Jackal. If you long for old-school spy cinema in which the intrigue is presented meticulously and in detail, special effects are not used to mask a weak script; pursuers are as fully realized as the pursued, and, against all logic, the viewer roots for both—The Little Drummer Girl will certainly not disappoint your expectations.

Someone once said of John le Carré’s novel that it is a spy story in the same way that Madame Bovary is about marital infidelity and Crime and Punishment is about murder. The television adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl also transcends genre boundaries, being above all a passionate study of human behavior in extreme situations.