SPOILER ALERT: I work backward from the ending in commenting on this brilliant limited series from France, with subtitles in English for all the languages spoken (except when the actors break into slightly accented English), which means Arabic, Farsi, and Russian in addition to the principal, French. Save for the last five minutes, it’s a perfect show: it’s intricately but not opaquely plotted, it contains believable but often eloquent dialogue, it features finely drawn and well-acted characters, right down to the “minor” parts (like Sylvain, the affect-less, middle-spectrum computer whiz), and it is punctuated throughout by interesting indirect discourse on both the performative double bind of the spy game and the brutal geopolitics of our time.
The central conceit of the show is the “legend” that field agents of France’s DGSE (the counterpart of the CIA) must live by—how they must learn a back story to sustain an undercover identity when on assignment overseas, which means how to stay in character, no matter what the circumstances. It’s an actor’s showcase, in this sense, a thespian manual, but there’s not much Method on display here because the “reality” is that agents inhabit roles that nothing in their pasts prepared them for: they’re strangers in strange lands, even when at home, where routine gossip (“office politics”) has life and death consequences. The layers of intrigue and interpretation—it’s not doublespeak, it’s close reading of every word, every gesture—are so many that you begin to wonder about the motives and multiple identities of the person watching alongside you.
The narrative through line is Guillaume’s (a.k.a. Molotru) abiding love for the Syrian beauty, Nadia el Mansour, an anti-Assad nationalist whom he met while pretending to be Paul Lefebvre, a professor of French and Arabic literature in Damascus. When her extra-marital affair with “Paul” is discovered by Syrian agents—he didn’t recruit her, but her association with him is enough to compromise her clearances and standing—she is jailed and threatened with torture and/or execution by the ruling family. Guillaume/Paul must then make the fateful choice that sets every other story in motion: to make the personal political by betraying his country, selling out to the CIA in exchange for its help in freeing Nadia, or to sever the connection between them, as a well-trained agent and dutiful patriot would.
Of course he chooses love, the personal, because, no matter what he writes to his daughter in explanation for his departure—it’s a fierce description of what it’s like to live a lie as a secret agent in the name of patriotic duty, a way of life that sooner or later makes you a secret to yourself—the political remains an abstraction: the French stakes in Syria are never made clear, except that all the other major players are there angling for a share of the ruins. The cynicism of the players, especially the CIA, only emphasizes the bureaucratic remove at which the game is played. It might as well be fantasy football.
All five seasons follow Guillaume/Paul/Molotru on his quest to be reunited with Nadia, on the one hand, and to return to France (and his daughter) as something more or less than a traitor, on the other. This journey makes him an assassin, takes him to prison as a hostage of ISIS, almost frees him in embattled Ukraine (in the Donbas, before the war), just about kills him there, and finally lands him in Russia as a recruit of Mikhail, a high-ranking FBS apparatchik. There “Paul,” now Pavel, a pampered triple agent who is selling Russian secrets to France in a desperate bid to return home—he’s supposed to be doing the opposite—betrays his sponsor just as he had betrayed Henri, the head of section at DGSE, when he chose Nadia over nation. To save his wife and son from disgrace, torture, and execution, Mikhail the Russian patriot defects, and then commits suicide.
The desolate conclusion of the series—Mikhail takes his revenge on Pavel from beyond the grave by hiring an old hand from Uzbekistan to kill Nadia—is inevitable, in the manner of great tragedy: Guillaume, the brilliant, charismatic spy, plays his appointed part so perfectly, for all the right reasons, that it kills everyone he cares for, and then some. The wake of destruction he leaves is wide enough to reach from North America to far Eastern Europe.
But the last five minutes are too much. It’s a dream sequence where Mikhail convenes all the people killed by Guillaume/Paul/Pavel’s dutifully devious machinations, not by his own hand. In character and costume, they toast our hero from around a long table, and Mikhail finishes off the ceremony by noting that Pavel has deftly used the one drop of goodness in each of these victims to condemn them all to the most ignominious ends.
This banquet of ghosts betrayed by and killed because of Guillaume/Paul/Pavel's various "missions" was a little too on the nose for me, if I understand the meaning of that phrase correctly: too many Banquos, too literally explained by Mikhail, perhaps the most ruthless, and yet vulnerable, of the entire crew.
In fretting about this ending, it occurred to me that Marie-Jeanne's elevation to head of the Bureau in the final episode was also weird, in view of what she told Ponte, the big chief, about her "plan" for its future. You give the job to the person who says she's going to end it?
But that got me thinking. Marie-Jeanne is the desk agent who trained Guillaume, who succeeds her boss Henri when he dies in the field trying to save Malotru, and who is herself ousted by Jean-Jacques, the head of The Bureau’s internal security (and a former double agent recruited long ago by the young Mikhail in 1993), and sent to Cairo. Her steadfast devotion to her trainee—she’s sent into Egyptian exile because she objected to J-J’s apparent sacrifice of Guillaume in the Donbas—is the bass line that keeps this music on track: she never misses a beat, not even when she knows how much she loves this secret agent of her own making.
That’s when the whole arc of the show came clear, when I realized that of course Marie-Jeanne deserves the job: she's the only character who never lets her emotions, her personal attachments—and she's got plenty, that's obvious, her devotion to her agents in the field, especially Guillaume/Paul, with whom she's desperately in love, guides her always—those emotions and attachments never distort her judgement.
In this, she’s unlike all the men—particularly the leading men, Guillaume/Paul, Henri, Raymond, and the pathetic Jean-Jacques—who can't seem to rise above their personal affiliations: love interests (Paul for Nadia, Henri for Guillaume), broadcast libidinal urges (Raymond Sisteron, the brotherly lothario), or the old-school vendetta (Jean-Jacques v. Mikhail a.k.a. Kennedy).
The late, snide remark about “gender equity” from Marie-Jeanne's male rival in the cafeteria—he thinks she’s got the politically correct edge on him—is hilarious and perfectly ironic, then, because she's the only one of the bunch who actually contains her emotions in the line of duty, as Raymond explains to the second in command when he's fishing for some negative comments about her.
So, she's not the final girl of slasher horror films, the one who outlives her friends by staying awake long enough, or taking the tools of revenge into her own hands. She’s the cool, dispassionate one, the last “man” standing. She’s the best person for the job because she won’t let the personal become political.
Such a brilliant series. The whole Marina Loiseau subplot/arc would be enough for an entire other, brilliant series.
Or maybe she won’t let the political become personal?