Sam Mendes, 2005, USA, 122 mins
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx
Q: When is an anti-war film not an anti-war film?
A: When it’s just a war film.
The problem facing Sam Mendes’ Jarhead is the one that has bugged almost all films of its type from the birth of cinema: that the representation of conflict can be as exciting as it is harrowing. The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum recalled once how legendary director Sam Fuller walked out of a screening of Full Metal Jacket, calling it “another recruitment movie”, the implication being that its scenes of bombs and bullets were not off-putting but alluring. Ironic, then, that the first 15 minutes of this movie should so closely resemble the training segment of that film with its eloquent drill instructors and boot camp milieu. Particularly so, since throughout his film, Mendes alludes to the war movies of yore and exposes their essential failings as moral tales – in one disturbing scene, marines are shown cheering on the Ride Of The Valkyries sequence from Apocalypse Now, at least until their commanders snip the moment when a Vietcong woman disables a helicopter with one grenade…
It’s fitting that the films Mendes most clearly attacks are those of the Vietnam war because, as a conflict, it still overshadows any that has succeeded it. At one point in Jarhead, the central protagonist hears ‘70s rock blaring out from a helicopter and asks why this war can’t have its own soundtrack – a complaint that underpins the whole movie. Based on the memoirs of a marine, Anthony Swofford, serving in the first Gulf War, it follows the fortunes of a platoon who ultimately fail to engage with the enemy. In short, it’s a war film without any combat. And that seems to be Mendes’ point – that this was a non-war, a war without any of its own essential character, a waste of manpower, resources and, most emphatically, time. The tension – if there is any – derives solely from whether the guys will ever get to fire their rifles, not what skirmishes they get into. It’s significant that they are not soldiers, but snipers, men on the periphery of the action. This is the essential nature of modern warfare – not hand-to-hand engagement but take-outs from afar, not the macho nobility of the fight but precision targeting.
So, what are we being sold here? A moral tirade against a wasteful war or an exercise in cynicism? After all, the viewer can’t help asking themselves what would have happened if Swofford had managed to get a shot in – would he have written his book? If he’d been allowed to go trigger happy and murder a few Arabs, would this film have become anything more than a gleam in an ex-English theatre director’s eye? Mendes takes a thoroughly objective approach to the conflict in that he merely follows the soldiers’ lives without any flourishes of anti-war rhetoric – just to observe what happens to these men should be enough.
But is it enough? The average grunt is not intellectually stimulating company – there’s little by way of enlightening comment in this film. Instead, we are left to ponder the eerily beautiful site of oil wells burning on the desert horizon, the surreal sequence of a horse appearing from nowhere covered in oil, the clever cut from confused shouting to silence and the pitter-patter of sand in a bomb attack. In short, those wonderful, bizarre, exciting sequences that are part and parcel of the war film… As Jamie Foxx’s sergeant points out, “Who gets the chance to see this?”
So Jarhead is another recruitment film. It’s worth comparing it with Anthony Mann’s forgotten but extraordinary Men In War (1957). This, too, is content to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of warfare – a platoon’s attempt to escape from behind enemy lines – but is a film of continuous combat. However, despite all the bangs and flashes, what you remember is the fatigue on the actor’s faces, the terrible sense of waste, and the worrying implication that the resort to extreme violence at the end is necessary. It’s a war film that is also an anti-war film – Mendes’, curiously, is neither.
Peter Strickland, 2009, Romania/UK, 82 mins
Cast: Hilda Peter, Tibor Palffy, Norbert Tanko
Katalin Varga is a strange artefact to find turning up in the 21st century, yet in many ways it's a sign of the times. Take its production history: a British filmmaker travelling to Romania to make his first feature, part of a growing diaspora of talent moving away from this island so it can realise its dreams and ideas elsewhere. Then there's the content: the age-old fable of a woman getting even with the men who raped her. Predictable enough, surely – except that this tale of revenge takes revenge on its revenger...
Katalin is a young mother living in a small village. But her husband discovers that she was sexually assaulted many years ago and that the person responsible may be their son's real father. Katalin is forced from her home and sets out on an odyssey to track down her assailant and kill him. As you can imagine, it's a case of a narrative travelling inexorably to a really unpleasant ending. But if this makes Katalin Varga sound of a piece with other contemporary arthouse fare such as Antichrist, then it's a shock to discover that its morality and tone is more old-fashioned, indeed biblical, than its non-mainstream identity would suggest.
Firstly, there's the visual style: the photography has a grainy quality reminiscent of the 1970s, making the landscape, though contemporary, seem far distant, a world preserved in aspic, slightly out-of-reach as in a folk tale or myth. The constant digressions into nature (away from that most immediate signifier of modernity, the city) are accompanied by an extraordinarily exaggerated sound design. As in the work of David Lynch, ordinary aural phenomena become ominous rumbles, portents of things to come.
But it's the film's attitude towards its protagonist that is most disturbing. Because, right from the beginning, it forces the viewer to do something considered more and more abhorrent by the modern liberal mind: to judge. We are introduced to Katalin through other people's eyes, through characters watching her return home across the fields. Then she discovers that her husband is already in possession of knowledge she didn't know was publicly available. It's as though the film is trapping her.
The director, Peter Strickland, stumbles a little after this enigmatic opening and Katalin's peripatetic journey thereafter gets bogged down in indulgent vignettes or portentous frozen images intimating some nebulous sense of menace. But then there is a striking scene where Katalin divulges her story to a couple as they row her down the river (the man being the one who assaulted her in the past). Hilda Peter's superb performance reaches its peak here, and the description of rape in her monologue – both brutally realistic (“I was dry and it burned”) and darkly poetic – may become the last word cinematically on the subject.
This pivotal moment, performed in the flux of a river so as to suggest a soul not at peace and an action not yet over, anchors a film that had previously been adrift. But it also twists the narrative in a new direction. Because the implication is that this is a victim that hasn't come to terms with her fate – she hasn't properly moved on. Whereas her intended target has become a husband and father, has come to terms with his dissolute past, and is indeed treated far more sympathetically.
What we're witnessing here is the clash of Old Testament morality – an eye for an eye – with the New Testament ideal of forgiveness. Thus Katalin Varga is revealed as a deeply religious film, almost reactionary in the way it argues for one spiritual doctrine over another to the point where it takes sides against a rape victim. That such a work should appear in this century and be feted by the cultural cognoscenti of the festival circuit might seem bizarre until we remember that the last two decades has seen an unprecedented rise in influence for the major faiths in the West. Perhaps Katalin Varga, with its almost Victorian mindset, is very much a film of its time after all.
Andrezj Wajda, 2007, Poland, 118 mins
Cast: Artur Zmijewski, Maja Ostaszewska, Andrzej Chyra
In his youth way back in the 1950s, Andrezj Wajda was one of the breakout filmmakers of the new Eastern European cinema. Under the Communist regime, he managed to produce works of a robust and tentatively challenging humanism, examining the travails of the Second World War and the faltering steps of the latest generation. Intriguingly, now that regime has disappeared, the veteran director (83 this year) has returned to that period to excoriate the lies and half-truths he and his colleagues had to labour under at the time.
The most important of these – particularly for Wajda as his father was apparently one of the victims – related to the Katyn massacre of March 5th 1940, in which nearly 15,000 Polish soldiers were executed and buried in mass graves. Nazi intelligence knew the Russians were responsible, the Soviet armies even then pushing to occupy Poland to create a buffer between themselves and the Germans. After their own invasion, the latter quickly made propagandistic capital out of the event, uncovering forensic evidence and exhibiting it on film. In the most fascinating section of Katyn, Wajda shows how the Communists reedited this footage once it was under their control – filmmaking as a path to falsehood rather than truth.
Wajda reverses the trend; his film is a warts-and-all exposé of what really happened. Not “based on a true story” or “inspired by a true story” but the true story itself. That makes it a valuable document and, judging by its success in its native country, something of a communal healing process for the Polish people. But it therefore also falls into the same trap as all those movies set up to act as cautionary history lessons – cf. Schindler’s List, Gandhi – in that its worthiness of content overwhelms considerations of form.
Wajda concentrates on the aftermath of the event rather than the massacre itself, detailing how various fictional families try to find out the truth about their missing loved ones. It’s an admirable decision, forcing the viewer to reflect on the difficulty of resisting official truth and, indeed, the dangers inherent in any act of resistance at all. And as a side note, it’s fascinating to note how vitriolic Wajda is in his condemnation of collaboration – Katyn is fiercely pure and patriotic in its spirit of defiance. But the result is a film that feels like a discussion piece with some (extremely graphic) flashbacks to bolster the message. The whole endeavour seems designed to oppress the audience, from its overpowering score to its solidly impressive, digitally-enhanced photography. There’s no room for debate, subtlety or modern, retrospective comment. It’s a deeply old-fashioned film, the work of a wounded war veteran still nursing bitter grievances. As such, it’s a fascinating artefact to find turning up in the cinema of the 21st century, but its very naivete perhaps makes one reflect more on Poland’s slow coming to terms with its past than it does on the art of its director.
Director: Paul Grimault
France/1980/80 mins
Lovers of Gormenghast will revel in this classic French animation. It's set in a gigantic castle soaring high into the sky, a higgledy-piggledy labyrinth of halls, towers, turrets, mile-wide courtyards, plains of stone criss-crossed by mock Venetian canals, zoos, ballrooms, empty palaces – a magnificent grand folly much closer to Peake's fantasy than the rather disappointing BBC adaptation of the '90s.
The story of Le Roi et l'loiseau is loosely based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale and involves a king (bad) lusting after a young shepherdess whose heart belongs to a chimney sweep (good). Charmingly, the two lovers in this version are paintings come to life, who are pursued by the king's own portrait, a much more handsome version of himself. The titular bird is both Greek chorus and the heroes' best friend who helps them out of scrapes.
These scrapes involve being chased by bat-caped secret police, who can merge into dungeon walls, and being imprisoned in a dreary netherworld where workers toil in the shadow of giant, clanking machines. Yes, the film has a dark side, and in these latter stages, resembles nothing so much as a mash-up of Metropolis and Terry Gilliam's wild dystopias. Furthermore, the blind musician encountered by the chimney sweep recalls the blind accordion player of Les Enfants du Paradis, the script of which was also worked on by Jacques Prevert, and whose spirit of Resistance runs through this post-war fable (started in 1947) up to its memorable final shot.
The character animation recalls the work of the Fleischer Brothers, but it's the film's own influence that is really noteworthy. It's impossible now to watch its airship-piloting, bowler-hatted henchmen without thinking of Studio Ghibli. And fans of Castle In The Sky will recognise the city-smashing robot at the end of Grimault's film as a distant ancestor of the lonely guardian in Miyazaki's classic. The beautiful score is by Wojciech Kilar, who provided similarly haunting themes for Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Ninth Gate.
Robert Aldrich, 1955, US, 105 mins
Cast: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Maxine Cooper
In his bizarre documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which looks at the history of the eponymous city through clips from Hollywood movies, Thom Andersen reserves special praise for Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. He notes how this independently produced film noir makes a point of taking its story out onto the real streets of LA and setting crucial scenes in recognisable locations rather than studio sets. This unaccustomed freshness to a genre usually associated with cramped rooms, shadowy alleyways and dimly-lit stairwells can still be felt in Aldrich’s film now. From the opening sequence shot from an open-top car on an out-of-town highway to the deserted petrol stations or bare, echoing hotel rooms where the action takes place, Kiss Me Deadly feels raw and immediate in a way its more stylised cousins do not.
It’s not just in the ‘feel’ of the film that Kiss Me Deadly stands apart from other noir; its treatment of the usual “private-eye” material is also distinctive. With Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place (1950) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), it forms a trilogy of apocalyptic noir, in which the emotional and physical devastation of the genre is taken to an extreme. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the ‘Big Bang’ itself – the core of a nuclear bomb – and the final scene, where the Pandora’s Box is opened, and a screech (literally – the sound design is extraordinary) of fire and brimstone pours out into the world is one of the most shocking in American film history. But what is even more disconcerting is the way Aldrich portrays super-sleuth Mike Hammer. Years before Robert Altman got to Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1971), Aldrich tore through the romantic role model of Humphrey Bogart and produced a ‘hero’ who was a violent meathead, a walking embodiment of American individualism gone mad, blundering his way into situations and causing death and mayhem as a result. As such, Aldrich cleverly undermines the very genre he’s working in just as he perfects the means of its suspense.
Kiss Me Deadly has something for every kind of film fan – the classical finesse of Hollywood’s studio age, the rawness and intelligence of the ‘60s counterculture picture, and the playfulness and irony of the modern indie (the opening credits roll upside-down). The cinematography is metallic, the dialogue lethal. It’s like a knife in the gut from an era when American film was losing its edge. Aldrich never quite matched it again – though Ulzana’s Raid (1971) came close – but at least its re-issue should endear it to a whole new generation of hard-boiled aficionados.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Setsuko Hara, Yoko Tsukasa, Mariko Okada
Japan/1960/128 mins
As the BFI's series of Ozu releases continues, it becomes harder and harder to find new superlatives for these extraordinary films. Suffice to say, Late Autumn is one of the supreme masterpieces in a whole clutch of masterpieces.
The story is simple - a mother is pressured by the people around her into marrying off her only daughter and thereby ensuring a lonely life for herself in the future. But Late Autumn works on a whole series of different levels – there's a genuinely tense plot as misunderstanding builds on misunderstanding, lots of wry humour, mostly at the expense of three interfering businessmen whose interest in the marriage really arises from their youthful lust for the mother, and a genuine sense of loss, as two people are pulled apart by the dictates of society. As such, it becomes something only Ozu could pull off – a “light-hearted tragedy”. And with its exquisite colour cinematography, it is also his most visually ravishing film.
It's paired with an early melodrama, A Mother Should Be Loved, in which a woman becomes distanced from her stepson when he discovers she is not his true mother.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Cast: Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura
Japan/1949/108 mins
The first film of Ozu's mature period, Late Spring is a beautiful and deeply moving portrait of two people whose special bond is torn apart by social pressure and mutual misunderstanding.
Professor Sumiya is an elderly widower living with his only daughter, Noriko, who has been ill for some time after voluntary work during the War. Now she's 28 and the wider family are concerned that she should be married. Sumiya feels guilty and agrees to arranging a match for her. But Noriko feels rejected and a growing divide opens up between them.
How to recommend one's favourite film – one that this writer feels is even superior to Tokyo Story? Suffice to say that it is a brilliant psychological examination of people loving each other at cross purposes and the loneliness that comes as a result. Ozu's formally rigorous style reaches its peak of expression in a series of simple but devastating shots – most famously, an urn caught in the moonlight as Noriko spends her last night with her father and she weeps silently beside him.
Sublime.
Max Ophuls, 1948, US, 87 mins
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jordan, Mady Christians
Over the years, cinema has made a pretty penny out of what we might call “sex myths”, those undying cliches of romantic fantasy. Heterosexual men have loads of them, the “prostitute with the heart of gold” being the most egregious. But there's also the “woman torn between her lust for a horrible rogue or her love for a decent man” where you-know-who always wins in the end. In the classic era of Hollywood, there was no beating about the bush – melodramas were “women's pictures”, an entire genre specifically designed to tap into the target audience's crudest emotions and get the tear ducts working overtime. And no “sex myth” loomed larger than the sensitive, loving female driven to despair (and sometimes penury) by a love for a terrible cad who barely noticed her or slept with every other woman in Christendom.
It's because of my antipathy towards such myths, and that last one in particular, that I initially dismissed Letter From An Unknown Woman, its story being precisely that of a woman who devotes her entire life to a man for whom she is but a passing fancy. Furthermore, the film is also part of a curious subgenre of European art film (here smuggled into the studio system) which pines for the heady, bourgeois days of the Belle Epoque, with its glittering ball gowns, horse-drawn carriages and nights at the opera - something which has always struck me as a nostalgia for class by any other name. But what I missed was the intelligence and sensitivity with which this material was treated.
The story is set in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Lisa is a dreamy young girl who becomes infatuated with the famous concert pianist, Stefan, living in the apartment next door. She builds her whole life around listening to him play and setting up “chance” encounters between them. Later, as an adult, she's willing to compromise both her reputation and her marriage to be by his side. Eventually, tragedy looms, and she opens up her heart to him in a letter – a letter that he receives in the very first scene of the film and which acts as a framing device for the narrative proper.
It's here where Ophuls' intelligence begins. The whole film is constructed of “frames”, of stories and the means through which those stories are told. It's crucial that Lisa tells her story, that her voiceover acts as an omniscient narrator, because it points up how much her love is a fiction she herself has created. Far from being the lovestruck heroine, she's someone who is clearly aware that she hasn't fallen for the mere man as such, but the ideals that he represents – art, music, beauty. In the most memorable scene in the film, she tells Stefan about her travel agent father and her fantasies of foreign countries to which she would never go, but which were important to her because they could then form an ideal, an unsullied memory. Thus she can understand his artistic impulse as a searching for what he can never attain or find satisfactorily in himself.
And Ophuls ingeniously sets this dialogue in a totally artificial world – a fairground “train ride” where the motionless carriage stands in front of a moving diorama, creating a fantasy experience of travelling to distant lands. But Ophuls contrives to show the rather tatty reality behind the spectacle – an old man moving the scenery by peddling furiously on a bicycle machine while his wife freezes in the ticket booth. Thus the fantasy is “framed” by the reality behind it, a device which Ophuls repeats throughout the film, from the bored female band that accompany Lisa's dance with Stefan to self-reflexive winks at the cinema audience themselves, as when a waiter adjusts a restaurant curtain to perfectly frame the loving couple for our eyes.
Time and again, the implication is made that our romantic fantasies actually arise out of, rather than transcend, mundane reality. But for Ophuls, that doesn't undermine the beauty or integrity of the fantasy itself. At one point, Lisa herself is framed by the object of her affections: she opens a door for Stefan and he sees her gazing at him from behind the glass – the perfect image of girlish adoration. Audiences may balk at the idea of Joan Fontaine playing the same woman from juvenilia through to middle age, but it's entirely appropriate given the never-ending innocence of her love, a strain of childlike faith unbowed by the years (and Fontaine's performance more than rises to the challenge). At other times, Ophuls uses composition to frame Lisa more cruelly, so that a shot of Stefan taking her back to his rooms for their one night together is exactly the same as one of him bringing home another lady friend earlier.
The Viennese setting – one usually associated with wit, irony and cynicism – actually works to the film's benefit here because it introduces a hard edge of reality to counterbalance Lisa's pure romance. And Ophuls intermingles the two to create a more complex and sympathetic characterisation for his heroine. Far from being a Dickensian ninny, she's perfectly capable of compromising herself on a material level – marrying the wealthy soldier, working as a model in a dress shop – to survive. This gives what could have been a piece of syrupy schmaltz a pleasingly adult sensibility; the romantic woman understands and looks kindly on the vices and follies of society, even takes part in them, while preserving a core of faith in her ideals. In this sense, Ophuls' film is far more than a decent melodrama; it's a work of outstanding humanism, richly textured, moving and wise in its examination of desire.
Jessica Hausner, 2009, Austria, 99 mins
Cast: Sylvie Testud, Lea Seydoux, Bruno Todeschini
What is it about modern arthouse films and miracles? It's as if a cinema that has always sought to offer an alternative to Hollywood materialism is now opposing it with the total opposite: blind faith. And given the current climate of rising religious extremism, is that a good thing? If nothing else, it makes what could have been an original and thought-provoking film into part of an established genre, already dangerously riddled with cliché.
Sylvie Testud plays Christine, who has been confined to a wheelchair for most of her life. She joins the pilgrims at Lourdes and takes a fancy to one of the volunteer officers. But at first, her disability seems to make her invisible, a burden to be taken care of, rather than a woman to be admired. Then an astonishing change takes place and she starts to walk. A miracle is announced and there is an atmosphere of mutual elation, before the inevitable jealousy and resentment towards her sets in...
Hausner's film works best as a dry comedy of manners, exposing people's petty self-interests in a world where religion has become tourism and faith is only beautiful as long as it benefits the individual. Testud is superb in a difficult role, especially in the heartbreaking final scene, where the enigmatic quality of her performance complements Hausner's restrained camerawork and forces the viewer to decide what has really happened, thereby testing how much they want to believe themselves.
If the film demonstrates intelligence, it's also a bit arch and a little too smug. In short, rather like the organisations that it shows running Lourdes. It may make you question your own beliefs, but given its status as “one of the best films of the year”, it's more likely to make you question your confidence in European cinema, which, on current form, needs a miracle to get it back on its feet.
Ang Lee, 2007, China/US, 158 mins
Cast: Tony Leung, Tang Wei, Joan Chen
‘Tis the season to be watching lovely ladies doing lewd things for comrades and country. Following hot on the high heels of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book – whose plot is so similar, it’s hard not to compare the two – comes Ang Lee’s tale of a young student forced into seducing a collaborationist during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1940s. Her job is to gather vital information for the rather naïve and clumsily managed resistance movement and eventually lead her prey into an ambush. But the course of true seduction does not always run true…
Whereas Verhoeven crafted a racy “sexpionage” thriller out of this material, Lee goes for a quieter, more sympathetic approach. No leg-flashing, pubic-hair-dying, woman-of-the-world heroine here, but an ingenue caught up in events she doesn’t fully comprehend. Whereas Carice van Houten’s character seemed to flash through events with barely a backwards glance, here we are made to feel the full burden of the female spy’s compromising situation. Her pain, her guilt, her growing inability to separate love from lust. The whole treatment of the scenario is more realistic, too. Leung’s politician is more convincingly corrupted than the ridiculous “nice Nazi” Verhoeven gave us. The course of seduction is more believable, with Tang Wei’s “hurt kitten” act a more acceptable lure than Outen’s bright-eyed, ultra-available come-on. And the sex is correspondingly more real – grasping, sweaty, brutal. So brutal, in fact, that these much-touted bedroom scenes are not so much titillatingly explicit as painful to watch.
But it’s here – in the very heart of Lee’s film – that the problems start. For he’s careful to show, through her facial and bodily reaction during intercourse, every nuance of emotion running through Tang Wei’s protagonist at that point. Wei responds with an outstanding performance – frankly, throughout the film, she acts the socks off everyone else on screen, partly because their characters are less well-drawn. But it’s the very fact that her psychological landscape is so clearly mapped out that blunts the film’s edge. Throughout Black Book, Outen maintained that extraordinary blank stare, the one so beautifully captured on the movie poster – a stare that could be read as voraciously sexual or utterly determined. It’s a look that’s so ambiguous, it invites the viewer in, to wrestle with it, to interpret its meaning. Is she turned on? Is she just play-acting? In Lust, Caution, there are few such doubts, the paradox being, then, that the viewer is thus brought closer to the character’s inner feelings but, at the same time, kept out of any interaction with the film. It’s an object lesson – to an era of cinema that has forgotten it – in the important art of filming faces.
Verhoeven’s movie is more a ripping yarn than a serious comment on war, and is further diluted by a series of outrageous twists. It’s simplistic…but compelling. Lee’s on the other hand, feels ponderous – it takes a good hour to sputter into life. His camera style and editing schema feel jittery, perhaps to convey the sense of discomfort and paranoia in his protagonist. But it feels rather more like a director uncertain of how to negotiate unfamiliar territory – connections between events and characters feel disjointed and clumsy with the result that a brutal killing some 30 minutes in feels more like a set piece than a crucial, emotionally-charged moment. Intriguing elements – like the carefully-reconstructed portrait of the more cosmopolitan, racially-integrated society that was pre-war China – get lost in the whirl and are not thoroughly explored. Similarly, Lee’s play with recurring symbols – the lipstick on the glass, the pun on “playing” (whether to do with mah jong, infidelity or living the high life while others suffer in abject poverty) – falls flat and ultimately feels like a directorial flourish, rather than a concentrated development of theme.
The truth is, for all its attention to detail (Lee’s governing characteristic as a filmmaker), Lust, Caution has the dubious distinction of making Black Book seem more convincing. The ruthlessly stripped-down mechanics of the latter’s plotting ring truer than the arduous journey undertaken by Lee; Verhoeven’s breathless urgency forces us to accept the heroine as an agent of lust and gives us no time to question it. Which leads one to the uneasy conclusion that the world of “sex and spying” – though a horribly real phenomenon for many women in wartime – can only work in fiction in one register, that of the erotic thriller. To treat it as serious romantic drama somehow renders it trite. Verhoeven’s film burns; Lee’s smoulders but ultimately fails to catch fire.