Director puts a new spin on romance
Can a bio-mathematician and a CIA operative meet-cute? They can in Wim Wenders’ newest film, a geo-political romance starring Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy, and based on the 2011 novel Submergence by J.M. Ledgard.
When we first meet Vikander’s ocean-obsessed math genius and McAvoy’s idealistic spy they’re literally worlds apart, as Dani explores the depths of the Atlantic while James rots in a makeshift Somali prison. With no answer to her cellphone calls, and innocent of his true occupation, she worries he’s quietly dumped her.
From this painful beginning the film rolls back a month or so to their chance meeting in a fancy hotel on the north coast of France. James tells her he’s a water engineer, the cover story he plans to use while looking for a terrorist in Somalia. She tells him about the layers of the ocean, from the sunlit epipelagic zone to the crushing pressure and blackness of the hadalpelagic. Over such multisyllabic sweet nothings they fall in love.
But work calls them apart. The rest of the movie finds a distracted Dani trying to concentrate on her oceanographic surveys as visions of James come to her unbidden. He, captured and branded a spy, fixes on her memory as a way of keeping a grip on his sanity.
The ending, however, may strike some as excessively simple, even hackneyed.