THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL
One of cinema’s boldest directors has made what could be the TV drama of the season
THE MOST EYE-CATCHINGLY unexpected creative match-up this TV season must be the pairing of boundarypushing film director Park Chan-wook, with the master of espionage fiction, John Le Carré. Park’s films, from Old Boy with its notoriously disgusting octopus-eating scene and extreme violence, to the intensely stylised eroticism of The Handmaiden, are infamously twisted affairs. Now we’re about to see the results of his first adventure in television, with a six-part drama he’s directed in full. For – wait for it – the BBC. The Little Drummer Girl is the latest Le Carré TV adaptation from Simon and Stephen Cornwell, the producers of The Night Manager, who also happen to be the author’s sons. But rather than follow up that global hit with a direct sequel, for which there is as yet no source material, the producers decided to pick another Le Carré best-seller instead as the basis for this new event series. The 1983 novel, previously turned into a decent but clunky Diane Keaton movie vehicle, touches on late-’70s Israel/palestine geopolitics, left-wing radical counter-culture, terrorism, sex and love. Like many a Le Carré story, it also depicts the existential angst of being a spy with unflinching realism.
Chan-wook’s cast is led by Florence Pugh (Lady Macbeth) as Charlie, an actress who meets Alexander Skarsgård’s enigmatic agent Becker while on holiday in Greece. He’s working for ruthless Israeli spymaster Kurtz (Michael Shannon), and all three are soon embroiled in an endlessly intriguing power struggle. It’s the kind of densely layered, twisting tapestry of a narrative for which this director’s exquisite technique promises to be the perfect match.