The Little Drummer Girl, episode 2 review: this Le Carré drama is languid, tense and seductive
With those hoping for another Night Manager having presumably turned over to another channel, the rest of us could tuck into the second episode of Park Chan-wook’s gorgeous adaptation of le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (BBC One).
Charlie (Florence Pugh) had her defences and confected backstory demolished by Kurtz’s (Michael Shannon) careful probing, and was then recruited for the role of a lifetime. She was to infiltrate a Palestinian militia cell by posing as the secret girlfriend of one of its members, presumed missing but in reality held by Kurtz and his cronies. And that was more or less it.
It was striking how little actually happened over the course of the hour yet, in the absence of conventional action, beneath the surface the tumult was unending. Pugh’s duels with Alexander Skarsgård’s Mossad agent Becker, himself playing the part of the missing Palestinian, were fascinating as each flitted in and out of character, our sympathies shifting with their’s until it became hard to know who believed what or why, just as le Carré likes it.
Narratives and perspectives shifted. Plots were hatched over Baumkuchen and ice lollies. Zooms and pans were outrageous, the sets often strikingly stagey and the soundtrack Bernard Hermann-esque. Such auteurist flourishes aren’t often seen on television these days, but the fine character work ensured that they didn’t distract from the story.
In fact they enhanced it, underlining the artifice underpinning both the story we were watching unfold and the manner of its creation. After all, fakery is at its heart – no one is what they seem and everyone is putting on a performance. Languid, tense and elliptical, The Little Drummer Girl is as seductive as the late-Seventies fetishism in which it wallows.
