Strife and grief
TV series based on geo-politics are usually for people who don’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni and don’t have the inclination to know it either. A prime example is the American series Homeland, which is good, simple-minded fun with whambang action, and whose protagonist suffers from a superiority complex, something US citizenship bestows automatically, I guess.
However, a couple of international series that I devoured recently show that apart from showing action with style and brio, there can be decent dialogue around it. Eric Rochant’s French TV series The Bureau is more of a talk fest than a framework for mindless action crisscrossing whole Europe and Arab nations. Imagine a modern-day John le Carré novel set in Paris written by someone who knows his Samuel Huntington from his Ben Taub and you have this riveting series. Set in the DGSE, the country’s external intelligence agency, the series has Mathieu Kassovitz as its most accomplished mole whose mission in Syria gets precarious for the agency on multiple levels. The most beautiful thing about this irresistible series set during the Hollande regime is that it will appeal to those who pore over the reportage from places of iniquity in The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, the NewYorkReviewofBooks and other such esteemed publications.
The intrigue is top-notch and the characters and milieu so fully formed that the whole series feels more like a docu-drama. As its taciturn hero who falls for a potential femme fatale who will turn his world topsy-turvy, Kassovitz is first rate. Rochant’s clever mile-high suspense drama gets its politics really right, a rarity in a day when style trumps substance all the time. He gets the whole dialogue around the Syrian war on point, he understands the bit-part actors and the main players and deals with all of them with equal finesse. In another subplot, a spy is trained to prepare her for an assignment in Iran and it’s not easy viewing. This becomes a bigger plot in the second season and Rochant’s coruscating intelligence shines through with his acute knowledge of the whole dialogue around the nuclear reactors in Iran.
Nothing in The Bureau seems straight out of the Kathryn Bigelow playbook and nuances are given the respect they deserve. Compared to this Rembrandt-esque work, Zero Dark Thirty comes across as a Damien Hirst monstrosity. Even the torture scenes are more Cold War than Abu Ghraib. Why does there have to be waterboarding when truth can be extracted by getting the person drunk on a full bottle of the finest whisky? There’s also deadpan humour, which makes the series doubly delicious.
“Al Qaeda spend more time on Koran and less time on Twitter, unlike ISIS,” says an Al Qaeda sympathiser. All the operatives have their code names from Tintin.
For those looking for guilty pleasures in this genre, Israeli drama Fauda will be more appetising. With the second season just out on Netflix, it’s apposite that you would binge on both seasons at once. Jointly written by Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, with the former also being the lead actor, this Israeli under-cover combat squad drama offers coachload of thrills. Israel-Palestine conflict is the flash point driving the narrative. Lior Raz as Doronmotivates his team to launch covert operations on the supposed terrorists on the Palestinian side. The antagonists in both seasons are tough as nails and that makes these cat-andmouse chases immensely watchable. The dramathriller is masterfully done by keeping the action real and mood perpetually intense.
Of course, unlike The Bureau, historical inaccuracies abound in Fauda (chaos in Arabic). In the second season, it gets a little more far-fetched with ISIS raising its dreaded hood even in Ramallah and Nablus. The show is also very biased in its myopic view of Palestine while completely ignoring the ham-fisted way the Israeli state treats the Arabs. Anyone who takes even a cursory look at news knows that Israel doesn’t hold any punches when dealing with protesting Palestinians.
But Fauda’s writers are busy painting them as evil and their sympathy lies with the IDF snipers. The series is gorgeously mounted and rompingly performed, but what could have been a topical, intelligent drama becomes dazed and confusing.