When John le Carre’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was broadcast as a seven-part BBC television adaptation in 1979, it was a sensation. The British public avidly followed George Smiley, le Carre’s aging, cuckolded, not-very-James-Bond-ish spymaster, as he hunted a Soviet mole in the highest level of the British secret service. The series is justifiably iconic, but to watch it today is to be slightly puzzled at its runaway success. The pacing is slow; the plot, conveyed often in flashbacks and expository dialogue that goes on for minutes at a time, is famously confusing; and the speech of upper-class English spies appears, to modern ears, bizarrely arch, almost fey.
But that’s the whole point. Viewers didn’t love the show despite these things: They loved it for them. The show’s esoteric vocabulary (“the Circus,” “lamplighters,” “scalphunters”) and its mastery of tone felt authentic and even seductive. Viewers, like the readers of le Carre’s novel, felt like members of the world’s most secret and high-stakes club.
In the French television espionage drama The Bureau (original title: Le Bureau des Légendes), whose fifth season recently arrived on Sundance Now, we have a Tinker Tailor for the new millennium, with the existential East-West rivalry of the Cold War traded for 21st-century terrain: Islamic State-controlled Syria, cyberwarfare, the Iranian nuclear program, and separatist Ukraine. The critic John Powers recently said The Bureau “may well be the best TV show in the world right now,” and I suspect he’s correct.
France, until recently considered a wasteland for scripted television, has belatedly embraced the prestige drama. The Bureau is one of the first French series produced using the American “showrunner” format, with writer and director Eric Rochant functioning with a similar level of control as The Sopranos’s David Chase or Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner. (This is Rochant’s last season. He’s passing showrunning duties to Jacques Audiard, director of the gritty 2009 crime drama Un Prophète, though Rochant will stay on as producer.) A recent New York Times profile describes Rochant as obsessed with authenticity and plausibility. The show is reportedly informed by interviews with former French intelligence agents, and the New York Times notes that Rochant banned American-style “big acting” from his production.
None of which is to say the show is dull. It’s gripping, tightly and suspensefully plotted, and character-driven. Our hero is Guillaume Debailly (code name: Malotru), an officer of the Directorate-General for External Security, or DGSE. Like George Smiley, Malotru isn’t exactly James Bond; portrayed by the French actor Mathieu Kassovitz, he is physically slight and hangdog handsome. The first season opens with Malotru, who has just completed a long-term undercover assignment in Syria, returning to intelligence headquarters. Awaiting him in Paris are his college-aged daughter, whom he’s barely seen in years, and the promise of some overdue normality and stability. Ending his undercover assignment, however, means destroying any evidence of his former “legend,” or undercover identity, and breaking ties with his beautiful Syrian lover, the historian Nadia El Mansour. But Nadia (the Franco-Moroccan journalist and actress Zineb Triki) is the kind of woman for whom even a hardened pro like Malotru would risk his life — and perhaps even betray his country.
Malotru’s inability to let go of his past life has enormous ramifications for French national security and for himself. Over the next five seasons, he is thrown into every conceivable trial: as a double-agent, as a triple-agent, as a piñata for the security services of numerous countries, and even, at one point, as a captive of ISIS. The show tiptoes to the point of convolution yet miraculously never crosses it or violates its own anti-Hollywood ethos. There are some nerve-wracking car chases and shootouts, but few martinis — shaken, stirred, or otherwise. Malotru’s goal is less to triumph than to endure. His weapons are intelligence, tenacity, and sheer Gallic stoicism. When he wins, it is by sticking to his cover stories at all times and at all costs.
His DGSE colleagues are each quietly charismatic in their own right: Malotru’s handler, Marie-Jeanne (Florence Loiret Caille); Henri (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), the unit head and father figure; Raymond (Jonathan Zaccai), a droll, caddish case officer whose transition to fieldwork turns disastrous; Marina (Sara Giraudeau), a seismology student recruited to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program; and Jean-Jacques (Mathieu Amalric), a brooding counterintelligence officer whose underlings call him JJA, after the legendary CIA officer James Jesus Angleton, for his obsessive, debilitating paranoia of Russia.
Each season works in new, ripped-from-the-headlines themes and new theaters: the former Eastern bloc, the Middle East, North Africa. The result is truly of our polyglot, globalized world, with dialogue in French, Arabic, Russian, Farsi, Khmer, countless other languages, and English so heavily accented or technical that even the closed captioning is sometimes driven to despair. (“Stuxnet” is rendered as “[unintelligible].”) Many of the scenes take place on location, in Peshmerga convoys or the mansions of the Iranian nouveau riche, but just as many take place in parking garages or drab conference rooms. “That’s the legacy of John le Carre,” Rochant told the New York Times: Even scenes of civil servants arguing in offices can be exciting, he said, when real “power is at stake.”
Although expensive by French standards, The Bureau is probably produced on a lower budget than an equivalent American show. Yet even that works in the show’s favor. The atmosphere is stripped down, terse, darkly funny, and always with a lurking sense of danger. As with le Carre’s world of gossipy British spy-bureaucrats, Rochant’s has its own arcane vocabulary and organizational idiosyncrasies to which we, the lucky viewer, are invited. Agents’ code names — Malotru, Milles Sabords, Moule a Gaufres — are curses uttered by Captain Haddock in the Tintin comics. Then, there is the show’s pulsing, electronic score, which, as an episode’s cliffhanger fades into credits, is enough to send chills.
Here, truly, is television.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
