A call to spy
director – Lydia Dean Pilcher
To emit – Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhika Apte, Linus Roache
Dramatically inert and strangely ineffective, A Call to Spy does the incredible women it wants to honor a disservice, and despite being overflowing with plot, it feels strangely empty. It’s always hard to write about such nondescript movies as this one, but the problems are always easy to spot.
Here, they arise mainly from a confusing script and a total lack of resources to do it. A Call to Spy, available on Amazon Prime Video in India, tells the story of three women, each of whom played a vital role in the Allied resistance against the Nazis during WWII, but has no idea who to focus on. your attention. And by trying (and failing) to do all three the same justice, the movie ends up changing them all.
Watch the trailer for A Call to Spy here
Stana Katic plays British ‘spy’ Vera Atkins, who is tasked with recruiting new agents to send to France. And so he chooses a crippled man and a pacifist, in the hope that their modest appearances will help protect his cover.
Sarah Megan Thomas, in addition to playing the most substantial role in the film, the ambitious Virginia Hall, is also recognized as the film’s writer and producer. A spy call can therefore be described as a ‘vanity project’, a term with clearly negative connotations, often interchangeable with the infinitely more positive ‘passion project’. But deciding which one to use is a matter of personal taste.
‘Passionate’ wouldn’t be the first word I’d use to describe this movie; It wouldn’t even be the tenth. A Call to Spy has a distinctive ‘made for TV’ quality, which could be because director Lydia Dean Pilcher had to cut corners or because, in addition to a diffuse feminist spirit, the film has little personality.
Since money is tight, so are opportunities. This steals the scale image and environments of the entire atmosphere. It feels like it was shot on a couple of soundstages, with location work restricted to mid-shots and close-ups, thus relieving the film of the pressure of filling the frame with precise period details such as cars and shop windows. . I wouldn’t be surprised if the production sewed only a dozen Nazi uniforms, that the extras had to trade with each other that day.
Sarah Megan Thomas and Radhika Apte in a still from A Call to Spy.
Joining Virginia on her mission is Noor Inayat Khan, played by Radhika Apte. Noor is described as the daughter of an American woman and an Indian man, a British citizen who was born in Russia but grew up in France. If anything, this gives Apte an excuse to use his culturally vague accent from real life in the movie as well.
In theory, the movie could have cast any of these three women as its sole lead and there would have been enough material (and perhaps even more) to sustain the story. Noor’s Gandhian values, her identity as an outsider, and the tragic nature of her life would have made a particularly strong biopic. But by running between the characters and simply touching on their noble contributions to the war effort, A Call to Spy runs out of breath and ends up bearing all the emotional weight of a Wikipedia entry.
One big reason for this is Thomas’ incredibly dry script, which is completely devoid of real tension. Characters are prone to making statements like, “We have to do this right!” And, “What we do here changes the course of the future!” But the clumsiest exchange involves Vera making up a seemingly spontaneous codename for one of the operatives and relaying it to her boss. “Philomena,” he says, “It means ‘strength'”. Subtle.
Also read: The Spy review: Serious Sacha Baron Cohen prevents the new Netflix series from being a joke
At no point do you fear for these women (they are in enemy territory after all) and at no point do you have an idea of what is at stake. This is unfortunate because, many times, they are in real danger of being caught, and the stakes, as we know, were quite astronomical.
None of these problems would have mattered if A Call to Spy had been a good movie, but it’s not a good movie precisely because of them. These women deserved better, and so did you.
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The author tweets @RohanNaahar
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