A call to spy Review: A frame from the film. (courtesy of YouTube)
To emit: Radhika Apte, Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Linus Roache, Laila Robins
Director: Lydia dean pilcher
Classification: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
A WWII spy drama relegating men to supporting roles would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Not only is it the first solo directorial gig from independent film producer Lydia Dean Pilcher A call to spy A welcome break from the norm, the film redraws gender lines to accompany the story of three brave women with the theme of multiculturalism.
A call to spy, Written and produced by actress Sarah Megan Thomas, who also does full justice to the film’s meatiest role, it is a carefully crafted and consistently engaging tale of a trio of female spies, an American, a Romanian Jew, and an Indian princess, who they worked for Sir Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) Section F (France) to “disrupt the Nazi war machine.”
Pilcher, whose production credits include 11 projects by Mira Nair (from The namesake to The right guy), as well as Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, directs the “true story-inspired” thriller with a firm, unwavering hand. It makes every minute of the two-hour movie count.
On Amazon Prime, the film has Radhika Apte as Noor Inayat Khan, a British citizen of Indian descent born in Moscow and raised in France. It was the subject of a 2014 docudrama Enemy of the Reich (directed by Robert H. Gardner and narrated by Helen Mirren) and a book The Spy Princess by journalist and writer Shrabani Basu, which filmmaker Shyam Benegal was about to adapt for the big screen. more than a decade ago.
A call to spy Review: A frame from the film.
A call to spy paints a larger canvas and doesn’t give Noor as much play as the other two main characters. But Apte hits the nail on the head as the enigmatic woman whose pacifist ideology makes it much more difficult to reconcile with the demands of the dangerous job she’s signing up for.
Sarah Megan Thomas is the main star of A call to spy. She plays Virginia Hall, a wooden-legged American whose acts of bravery as the SOE’s first female undercover agent opened doors for other women to follow her example.
Thomas gets strong support from Stana Katic, who plays the recruiter stationed at the Baker Street headquarters of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, headed by Maurice Buckmaster (Linus Roache) and of course. The script ensures that each of the three women at the center of the film, regardless of the weight the plot gives them individually, holds our attention until the end of the film.
When asked why she chose to become a signaller, Noor says, “I play the harp and piano and signaling is like music; there is rhythm in it.” The meaning of her name (Arabic for light), is alluded to the couple of times Noor’s mother, Pirani (Laila Robins), is on screen. A mother’s anguish when her daughter ventures into the unknown, an area where life and death are separated by a fine line, underscores the human cost of Noor’s vocation.
“Why is this your war?” That’s the question Noor, who writes children’s stories, faces before being accepted into the fold. “I am a British citizen,” Noor replies. I grew up in France. It is my home. I can’t let the Nazis do what they are doing. “
She is Muslim, Indian and female – that adds up to three degrees of separation from mainstream British espionage. Thats not all. Besides, he is Sufi. He has reservations about the violence and he lets his partner in training, the spy Virginia, know. “I’m a pacifist,” says Noor. They are training us to kill. “Virginia responds” They are training us to survive. “
Finally, just before Noor gets on a plane that is sent to France to rescue a seriously injured agent, Vera asks him again if he still has any questions. Noor doesn’t. “I am resolved,” she says. “I can fight. My resistance is not motivated by hatred.” Its twin causes, as it pointed out on a previous occasion, are truth and peace.
Vera and Virginia have their own “disability” to content themselves with as they carry out their pioneering moves in a male-dominated sphere; in the case of the latter, the disability is physical as well as belonging to their gender. Vera is a Romanian Jew, which makes it difficult for her to obtain her British citizenship documents. She lives in constant fear of being deported.
Virginia works at the United States Embassy in London. She wants to be a diplomat. But his attempts are repeatedly frustrated. At the operational level, where she almost quickly became “one of the deadliest allied spies in Europe”, she still has to tolerate a collaborator in France who insists that “women shouldn’t be in the field, certainly you shouldn’t. . a lot of career involved. “
The race that the three tough ladies must do is literal and figurative. Back in London, Vera fights her own battle to end her “unofficial, untrustworthy” status while monitoring espionage operations on the ground in France. Virginia and Noor, meanwhile, run and hide a lot to evade the Gestapo.
A call to spy Review: A frame from the film.
From the beginning, the audience is interested in the fate of Virginia and Noor, the two women who have gone beyond enemy lines to collect and transmit intelligence, thwart Nazi plans, and enlist the locals in the fight against fascism.
The narrative is frequently interspersed with Virginia’s voice providing insight into what is happening in France as the Nazis ruthlessly extend their rule across Europe. “I have never seen so much hatred. The Germans control what the French read and hear. There is false information everywhere,” he laments. Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar in the times we live in?
As Virginia’s anger fades, we see her with her top French assistant, Dr. Raoul Chevain (Rossif Sutherland), outside a museum blatantly displaying posters advertising an anti-Semitic exhibit. The scene resonates beyond its context in the film because the hate mongers are back among us in different parts of the world with their terrifying mainstream and intimidating portrayal of nationalism.
Nothing A call to spy – the title is obviously a “call to arms” game – suggests it’s a limited budget movie. Kim Jennings production design is of the highest order. The locations in Philadelphia replace London and parts of France, while Lyon and Paris are recreated in Budapest. But Jennings is so authentic with her recreation of the locations and backgrounds that you wouldn’t know if they didn’t tell you.
There is not a tone out of place in the film’s color palette, which, with rust, pale brown and green dominating, evokes the UK and Europe of the early 1940s. Director of Photography Robby Baumgartner composes images that are lush without being overly varnished.
A call to spy It may not look like the most captivating spy thriller you’ve ever seen at first glance, but stick with it for a bit, no more than five minutes or so, and you’ll be hooked. The movie adapts quickly to things and stays there forever.
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