TV
TV review: The Little Drummer Girl Episode 5
Charlie's training with the Palestinians in the latest episode of the BBC's Sunday night spy thriller
November 22, 2018 17:03
Charlie's training with the Palestinians in the latest episode of the BBC's Sunday night spy thriller
November 22, 2018 17:03I’m not altogether sure why the young English actress Charlie (Florence Pugh) is called the little drummer girl — the title of John Le Carre’s slow-burning Sunday night spy thriller — unless we are meant to think of her as one of those wind-up toys, ready for manipulation by both sides.
We last saw Charlie — supposedly the lover of Salim the Palestinian — coming face-to-face with his fairly scary sister, Fatmeh, (Lubna Azabal) after being bundled into the boot of a car in Beirut.
Now we are plainly approaching the end-game, as Charlie, having given Fatmeh enough details about Salim to convince her that she is a bona fide recruit to the Palestinian revolution, ends up spending a month in a Palestinian training camp in the Lebanese mountains.
“You are here to become a weapon of the Palestinian cause”, says one of the camp leaders to the raggle-taggle group of foreign volunteers. And, you know, it’s really not a nice place. Besides the primitive conditions and people screaming orders all day long, there’s a list of rules as long as your arm about no privacy, and no intimacy. Certainly no-one trusts anyone else.
Gadi Becker (Alexander Skarsgard), Charlie’’s Israeli handler/lover, has warned her that things are going to get up close and personal between her and the Palestinians. They will treat her like family, he tells her, and “you will be ashamed of deceiving them”. She might even be tempted to tell them the truth, he says, but that would be a Really Bad Idea. Because she will definitely be tortured and killed.
So while Charlie laboriously turns into a pocket revolutionary, even wearing a freshly ironed martyr’s t-shirt bearing Salim’s face — how handy to have a whole heap of iron-on-transfers, Fatmeh — the Mossad team, with an increasingly morose Gadi and Marty (Michael Shannon), kick about in London, trying to figure out what Khalil, the Palestinian mastermind who is brother to Salim and Fatmeh, will do next.
There is a lot of nigh impenetrable by-play with postcards and fake drops in postboxes, while the Israelis spend hours deciphering the Palestinian cell’s code. Finally, they think, they have it figured out.
Time for a visit, given that they are in London, to British intelligence chief Commander Picton, a truly vulpine performance from Charles Dance, who does just about everything except flourish his cape a la “Maria Marten and the Murder in the Red Barn”. He pretty much does actually twirl his moustache, though, telling Marty that he admires the Israeli’s own hirsute upper lip.
Marty and the team reckon there’s going to be some sort of an attack in London. To Marty’s evident horror, the commander — who has served in mandate Palestine and isn’t, shall we say, a great fan of Israel — appears to know all about Charlie, the “English bird” who has been spotted by British intelligence driving suspect cars across European borders. And he knows all about the “roasted” Palestinian, who died in an Israeli-devised fireball.
Picton makes it clear to Marty how unimpressed he is with Mossad tactics. “It’s one thing”, he snarls, “to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Quite another to take a bloody great shit all over me without the courtesy of a weather report”. The British, he preens, invented just this kind of undercover operation during the war — Operation Mincemeat, wherein a corpse was stuffed with misleading information. Ironic, really, that in real life, Mincemeat was the idea of a British Jewish intelligence officer, Ewen Montagu.
Playing the role of her life, Charlie is brought back to London by the Palestinians. And nobody — probably not even Charlie herself — knows which way she is going to jump.
