La petite fille au tambour

The director is weak, the original story is great. What can I say, I'm an avid le Carre fan! To paraphrase Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine in Deathrap, 1982) it's a story so good a bad director can't f**k it up. Check out the other comments, I agree with them. Klaus Kinski is great, he chews the scenery, and the supporting cast are all mini-gems. I was trying to decide if I liked Yorgo Voyagis, and I do. He may be too still for some people, but I believe Diane when she falls in love with him. And he has haunted eyes when he has to do bad things which are necessary for the Cause. Diane Keaton is so miscast. She's too old, she can't be an American doing St. Joan in England! She's good, but she can't be Charlie, she just can't. Maybe Helena Bonham-Carter, or Vanessa Redgrave when she was young, oh heck, there must be hundreds of english actresses slavering for this role at that time.

Nevertheless, I love the movie despite Diane Keaton (she does a good job, it's just I can't buy her in the role!).

An English actress, who is widely known for being adherent of Palestinian, is enlisted by the Israelis to catch one of the most dangerous Palestinian terrorists.

A best-selling spy novel (allegedly based on Vanessa Redgrave) from the pen of an exceptionally complex and downbeat author turns to be a superficially very slick, fast-paced and action-packed but vaguely unsatisfactory, long-winded thriller that cheats on both faithful adaptation and real political background. Worth watching for its technical flair and professional handling all round, the content has lost somewhere among the bloodshed.

It's been years since I've seen this movie (or read the book, which I did also), and I'm prompted to say something only because I'm reading a new novel, set in Sarajevo, on roughly the same subject, which brings it all to mind. Quite simply, Diane Keaton (whom I like, sometimes) was abysmally miscast, and since the movie turned around her it hadn't a chance. She was too old, too personally quirky, too American. Charlie is a character whose complexity is that of youthful dumbness mixed with superficial knowingness. There are lot of actresses who could have done it (Natasha Richardson might have been one of them, which would certainly have been interesting), but Keaton wasn't one of them.

It's 1981 West Germany. Katrin delivers a bomb made by mysterious PLO bomb-maker Khalil killing an Israeli diplomat and his family. Charlie (Diane Keaton) is a naive pro-Palestinian actress. She is in Greece to do a job. When she spots Joseph, she believes him to be the masked Palestinian spokesman whose meeting she attended. He's actually an Israeli Mossad agent and they had taken the real masked man who is Khalil's brother Michel. The whole Greece trip is an Israeli trick. They reveal themselves to her and Martin Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) recruits her to be the brother's girlfriend to infiltrate Khalil's group.

John le Carré's brand of espionage stories is often muddled. His world is a murky chaotic vision where questionable things are done which are often not the right course of action. Having said that, I don't understand why the Israelis would ever recruit Charlie. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't see Charlie helping the Israelis or ever believe them enough to really help them. They don't need the recruit to be Jewish, just not anti-Israeli. It might make sense if they pretend to be another terrorist group hoping to connect to Khalil. It's simply hard to understand the Israeli's course of action. Charlie's motivation for her journey is way too twisty. If one can ignore the questionable motivations, the plot is an intriguing twisty affair.

This film is detailed and occasionally harsh, but told by a master storyteller. the director has modified the John LeCarre novel somewhat, but weaves a strong story. It's a little hard to follow if you don't know much about the world of Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but provides quite an education by its end.

It begins with the assassination (bombing) of an Israeli diplomat and family and then jumps to an American stage actress, Charlie (Diane Keaton), who's currently living in Britain. She is ideologically a supporter of the Palestinian cause. She has a problem with falling in love easily and sympathizing with her lover. You begin to see the wheels turning in Israeli intelligence as they research and try to react to this most recent terrorist bombing.

They skillfully recruit/seduce her by pretending to support the Palestinian movement. To be effective in their scheme, they need someone authentic. They try to get under her skin and into her personal psyche (why she is an actress, pain in her life). Klaus Kinski is superb as the head of the Israeli intelligence effort.

After feeling more confident, they put her work to infiltrate the Palestinian-backed terrorist camps to ultimately get to the almost impossible to find bomber Khalil. This involves serious physical/military training. She excels and is given more and more trusted tasks as the story progresses. The story takes many twists and is very detailed and realistic in it's portrayal of both sides. It gets a little heavy, but is fascinating to watch unfold even a second time.

I give it a solid recommendation.