More from The Circus

Rating: 9/10 (23 September 2011)

This film opened Cambridge Film Festival (UK - 15 to 25 September 2011), and the review is taken from my entry on the Festival web-site * Contains spoilers * It was heartening to hear someone else say that following the plot didn't matter to enjoying the film, and, although I did not really see any of the t.v. series, to agree that recreating the atmosphere of the early 70s was a good thing to witness. (Oh, I did my best to follow the plot, but, in all honesty, I was put off early on by remembering 'Spies' from Fry and Laurie, with, respectively, their own Control and Tony: 'Control, I hear Firefly's been taken', etc.) That apart, and other irrelevant thoughts that came into my head (about agents and double-agents in relation to much-inferior products such as Salt), I congratulated myself on realizing what had really happened to one character (if only by twigging that it had to be the case with someone of Mark Strong's billing), and seeing the significance of how regimes in all sorts of workplace can change for the worse.
Looking for secret folders and smuggling them out reminded me of Kate Winslet implausibly getting away with it in Enigma, but, for the life of me, I couldn't understand why John Hurt's flat would not have been stripped of the vast assembly of material there (unless it was, despite being transported elsewhere for Gary Oldman's Smiley to look through, just some unrelated hobby of his): it is the first thought on Colin Firth's mind to get to another character's property first and take things from it, when he is reported killed.
What counts, though, as came out in response to the question that I put to Gary Oldman (and others) at the end, is what the characters are experiencing at their deepest level, which, for Smiley, was felt as his wife's infidelity: I had asked what scene (or series of scenes) was central not to the story, but to his experience of the emotional core of the film, and this seemed to be how it would feel, in the circumstances, to need to hear another's account of becoming involved with a woman, what she meant to him, and what he would do to seek to protect her.
Not bad for an opening night!