The melancholiness of spying

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2012)

The pace is languorous, at times excruciatingly slow. The music is sombre and deep, interspersed with long pregnant pauses of complete silence. The lighting is low and casts long shadows. The colours are muted, often grey and blue, but at times amber and ochre. The mood is distinctly chilling and sinister. Welcome to the murky world of counterespionage during the heydays of the cold war.
After a bloody prelude set in Budapest, George Smiley is pulled out of retirement to unearth a "mole right at the top of the circus". How the laconic Smiley goes about this assignment is never made amply clear and the viewers are expected to workout the jigsaw puzzle for themselves. There are gruesome corpses, but the killing is mostly off-screen, except for two, one of them stunningly sudden. The narration is elliptical with flashbacks that are short and often confusing. The Russian passages of conversation are deliberately not subtitled. The editing is quicksilver and anticipatory. I am still trying to figure out the Freudian symbols of railway tracks and points, or the fat bespectacled kid.
The movements of Gary Oldman's Smiley are laboured and arthritic. The wry British humour manages to ooze out in a couple of scenes. Through extreme close-ups, director Tomas Alfredson manages to evoke the melancholic world of spies. It is anything but fun and glamour. The atmospherics are brilliant transporting us to a world of ticker tapes and shrill telephones. It was a time when cigarette smoking was uber-cool.
The denouement is deeply disappointing; it comes as a big anti-climax. This is a literary film; unless you have read the books you will not know that Karla is Smiley's Russian archenemy. The film is a must-watch if you are a Le Carré fan; otherwise it will tax your grey cells.