Mad Men is finally back (a scintillating account of the premiere)

 Mad Men - official poster

The prolonged awaiting has been rewarded with an almost 2 hours season premiere on March, 25. The creators managed to keep up with huge expectations – it is the same exquisite, stylised and visually arresting show.  Memorable lines, as always. Having in mind these expectations and a certain pressure from the audience, the challenge now is how things will go on from here.

Season 5 seems to be running under the auspices of social changes in the 60s. Both the opening and the closing scene are pointing out to the intensification of socio-historical changes and sooner or later (actually at the end of episode two) several characters will be facing and feeling the consequence of these liquid times. Apparently, the opening scene is set exactly in 1966. Young men from an advertising agency are throwing down bags filled with water on protesters picketing on Madison Avenue. According to the New York Times, an identical incident occurred in 1966. (See more details here) What appears as an inoffensive, self-enjoying game of several immature executives perfectly sums up their ignorance regarding social realities.

The closing scene is even more puzzling. Reading about the embarrassing incident at the Y&R, the executives of Sterling Cooper Draper Price decide to humiliate their competition by running a job advertisement. In this childish corporate war, the words used in the job advertisement seem to be inoffensive and subtle (at least pour les connoisseurs): ‘Sterling Cooper an equal opportunity employer’. Intended as a hilarious hint to the dropping of bags filled with water, these words are taken seriously by a dozen of African-Americans who fill the lobby of the agency looking for a job. Is it just me, or is it the lobby full of Negroes. They are all job applicants, encouraged by some words so common to be spotted today in any company’s recruitment ads. One of the interesting things with Mad Man is that you are never sure about characters’ prejudices/feelings. Firstly, it was the story with Salvatore, when everybody knew he was gay, but nobody was talking about this. Secondly, it is this matter: Roger, Don, Pete, Bert and Lane discussing how to deal with a crowd of African Americans job applicants. Nobody expresses their true feelings so we don’t know if we are dealing with racism, bigotry or just indifference. They all talk about the impossibility of hiring a black secretary because of the financial situation of the company. On the other hand, they can’t bluff it since there might be a reporter out there amongst the applicants who would be more than happy to write about discriminatory practices on Madison Avenue.

 Now, getting back to some memorable, laughable moments: the party. Don's new wife, Megan, is throwing him a surprise party for his 40th birthday. The event is not just an awkward and embarrassing moment for Don (apparently, she doesn't know that he hates surprises and a certain type of exposure), but also a chance for the show designers to revitalize some raggle-taggle collections of 60ish outfits. Also, an occasion for Megan to show us some of her secret 'charms' by singing Zou Bisou Bisou and dancing. It makes you just want to plunge there.

And, of course, it’s also a great opportunity to hear some gossip on the next day. Lane Pryce remains one of the most memorable characters in terms of language peculiarity. Asked by Joan to tell her about the party, Lane, on whose face at the ‘banquet’ you could have read how appalling he finds Megan’s ‘performance’, secludes himself in his typical British politeness: Mrs. Draper put on a bit of a burlesque. She danced and sang in front of all of us. She was quite the kickette.

 Mrs Draper putting on a bit of burlesque

Mrs. Draper the kickette

And Lane Pryce - appalled

 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy....Ocean Story

'He looked into the water and saw that it (the ocean of stories) was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity...' Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories

 

Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Carre’s novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is an ocean of interlinked stories. Some of them are true. Others are completely false. But there is enough room in these waters for a third category of stories: the ones which are false, but function as true and vice versa. The stories which are intentionally designed to look genuine in order to mislead agents, institutions or entire governments.

George Smiley 'enjoying' his forced exile from the Circus

The plot is simple, as Control (a sequential but powerful appearance of John Hurt) puts it: ‘There is a mole. A rotten apple. Right at the top of the Circus. The Russians have planted it in the British intelligence service’. George Smiley (Garry Oldman in an outstanding performance) is invited by a government top official to come back from his forced retirement and find out who the mole is. From here, the movie develops in two directions. The first one follows Smiley’s attempts to put together diffuse clues about the history and identity of the current senior members of the Circus in order to find out who the double agent is. His efforts invite the spectator to plunge into the world of Cold War espionage games, where plots and subplots are interlinked in a labyrinth of appearances. Instincts are seen to be more valuable than any reasonable explanation: ‘You once told me to trust my instincts about women, Mr. Smiley. Well, my instincts told me this woman had some treasure’ says Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) the adventurous and (sometimes) idealist British agent. Flashbacks are often used to interfere with Smiley’s present attempts to put together the pieces of this puzzle and unveil affinities between characters.

The Circus: Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Control (John Hurt), Smiley (Garry Oldman), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds)

If Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had followed just Smiley’s attempts to reveal the intricate stories of this maze, it would have been another conventional spy story where the end functions as an illuminating response to all questions. George Smiley’s personality becomes the second focal point of the film since this is an attempt to establish a different image of the Cold War secret agent. Contrary to popular belief, it is revealed that spies are not only breathtakingly ordinary (in John le Carre’s own words) but also solitary fellows, ghostly presences. Their social life is easily confounded with their profession since Smiley’s closest persons – his wife Ann and his best friend Control – are both involved in the secret service to a certain extent. Once you are no longer part of this ‘family’ your life becomes a prolonged waiting with reactivation or death as best possible scenarios. So, forget about nice cars (of course, if you don’t include retro vehicles from 1970’s London) beautiful women (apart from Belinda), or popular secret agents, always the focus of attention with their fashionable gadgets. This is a world of loneliness. ‘You are a good watcher though, eh? Us, loners, always are’ says agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to a chubby, marginalized kiddo.

'There is a mole'

Nostalgia seems to be the unending feeling characterizing this universe. Smiley appears sentimental to returning to some past condition: ‘Old Circus is gone anyway’. When he consults Connie Sachs for her encyclopedic memory, Smiley acknowledges not only the passage of an era, but also that years have passed over them. ‘That was a good time, George’ says Connie leafing the pages of an old album. ‘It was the war’ Smiley replies. Even at the agency’s Christmas Party, (with a mock Father Christmas wearing a Lenin mask) when the British agents start to sing the anthem of the Soviet Union in Russian, we are not sure if this is an ironic caricature, a reverence to their enemy, or a form of nostalgia since some of these spies were recruited from former KGB agents.

A Marxist Santa

The film is doubled with a series of subtle gestures, some of them being almost unexplainable if you are not familiar with Carre’s novel or the 1979 adaptation of the story. For example, the ending delicately conveys that there is a special relation between Jim Prideaux and Bill Haydon, but the clues about this (sexual?) ‘commitment’ are almost impossible to follow: a smile, an eye contact, a tear drop.

Belinda and Ricki Tarr