La petite fille au tambour

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.

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.

Having read the intriguing novel beforehand, I had looked forward to a film adaption. At that time I always imagined Andrea McArdle, a young Broadway stage actress and the original "Annie" was not only the right age, but had the look and personality of Charlie as described in the book.

Sadly, the casting of Diane Keaton was just a disaster. A choice the entire production never could overcome. Although a good actress, Keaton was about 15 years too old for the role of an ingénue who becomes the obsession of a terrorist, and her pronounced New York accent was too much at times.

The movie follows the novel very closely, perhaps too closely for it's own good. It should nave been about 20 minutes shorter. Still, even at it's full length, the screenplay misses the most interesting moment in the book, where the reader is left to ponder if Charlie has not only infiltrated, but, truly joined the "movement" and was ready to kill for the terrorist group.

The actual production seemed a bit on the cheap side. It appears the director wanted a look of reality, but by 80s standards that meant filming on location using real streets with little local activity to get in the way.

The rest of the cast, except for Klaus Kinski's star turn is totally forgettable.

Finally, over the years I've come to realize, The Little Drummer Girl was a story that was best served on the written page. Too much of the story is internalized in Charlie's mind, and that personal struggle is not easily translated to film.

Diane Keaton stars as an actress who falls for a Palestinian terrorist, only to discover that he's really a Mosad agent posing as a Palestinian terrorist. They want to recruit her to pose as the girlfriend of the real terrorist in order to trap his brother, who is a bigger and badder terrorist. One of a slew of mediocre John le Carré adaptations. The film takes an excessively complex and elliptical approach to unveiling the plot, leaving to viewer puzzled for at least an hour of it's 2 hour running time. Keaton feels miscast, but Klaus Kinski adds quite a bit of life to the proceedings as the main Mosad agent. An extremely young Bill Nighy pops in and out as Keaton's friend.

This 1984 film based on John Le Carre's book could well have been written just a few days ago. The confrontation between Israel and Palestine has not changed over the years although the explosive device chosen in the film happens to be a nasty bomb hidden in a suit case and detonated at a distance. Much of the excitement of the story seems to revolve around the preparation and delivery of the suit cases and the spy and counter spy activities.

My reason for choosing this film was to see more of the work of Klaus Kinski (an explosive personality if ever there was one) but in this film he was very much in control. In the role of Kurtz he is responsible for selecting Charlie (Diane Keaton) to spy among the Palestinians. Charlie being a superb actress could handle the job expertly using her feminine charms.

The film has a very large cast...too large in fact...and one tends to get lost amongst all the characters trying to remember which are the Israelis and which are the Palestinians.

The film literally starts with a bang and the search is on to find the perpetrators. As the tension mounts and the bombs explode, one keeps asking, "Who will be next?"

One cannot visualize a happy ending for such a film. While it makes exciting viewing the tragedy is that lives are still being lost each day as the confrontation continues and hopes of peace seem to become even more remote.