Anyone not in love with Michelle Pfeiffer?
OK, not her, but the character she plays in 'The Russia House'.
Екатерина Борисовна Орлова. Ekaterina Borisovna Orlova.
Katya.
This le Carré story is eminently simple. Some dude, a bit strung-out of course, a bookseller (has his own firm Abercrombie & Blair) and one-time semipro soprano sax-player named Bartholomew Scott Blair, Barley for short, is sought by the above Katya who has a book she wants him to publish. She's never met him.
Barley's supposed to be in Moscow, where Katya lives, at a book fair. Katya, also in the publishing business, plans to meet him there and ask him to publish the book. She goes to the fair but he's not there. Instead she finds his associate Niki Landau.
'If you love peace, please'
Katya wants to submit this book, but to Barley, to no one else. Niki doesn't get Katya very far. Finally, as he turns his back to her one more time, she begs him.
'If you love peace, please...'
Now she's got his attention.
The year? Somewhere between 1987 and 1990. Gorby's in power, Maggie's noticed, she's talked to Ronnie about it, Ronnie's going to meet Gorby, etc.
1987 is also the first time John le Carré's been let in the Soviet Union. His correspondence with Soviet authorities has been mostly one-sided, he says: he sends inquiries, they don't respond. And all his books are banned. Then suddenly things change.
Those who've read 'Little Drummer Girl' know that the book's preface comes with a lot of thank-yous to those who helped le Carré with his research. One gets the feeling that he looks at one thing one time only, then sets about writing it all up. Same here. One visit to Russia and abracadabra you got a book with Barley and Katya.
Katya's book, which comes in three parts, somehow ends up with British Intel. Because, incongruously enough, Niki can't find Barley when he gets back to London. (We find out why in a bit.) And Niki's looked at the book and seen, we're to assume, that there's something funky about it. So he approaches British Intel. Who immediately want to know more about it, and want to locate Barley, who can't be found.
They break into Barley's London flat, rummage around, find his soprano sax, then discover his bank statement - from Lisbon. So their people in Lisbon dig him up, and some of the London crew travel down to Lisbon to meet with him.
The book was initially a no-go with Hollywood. They couldn't see anything interesting for their demographics. But then Sean Connery came on board. And then Michelle Pfeiffer. Barley and Katya. Then the rest just literally poured on. James Fox, Roy Scheider, director Ken Russell as an actor, Martin Clunes in a role totally without dialogue and so peripheral you're likely to miss him, JT Walsh as the kind of US military you live to be able to hate, John Mahoney of Frasier fame, Michael Kitchen... The list is endless. Screenplay by Tom Stoppard, music by Jerry Goldsmith, sax by Branford Marsalis.
'The Russia House' doesn't always hit its mark. One gets the feeling that Schepisi's not an actor's director, that he doesn't flush out dialogue that doesn't work. After all, it's Tom Stoppard! But Tom Stoppard can misfire as they all can.
Cringe awards go to Michael Kitchen for one occasion and Roy Scheider all the way through. Thankfully Sean and Michelle sort things well. The Clunes part is relegated to intermittently waking up the audience.
'The Russia House' is only the second Hollywood movie to be filmed in the Soviet Union. A key role - 'Dante' - is played by Klaus Maria Brandauer, whom Connery met from his work on Never Say Never Again. (Connery started the screenplay.) Dante's namely the author of the book Katya has.
So what do we see at that point? You can mostly guess. The Brits and the yanks find the book interesting to say the least. Part of what they now want to know is who wrote it and if the information therein is genuine.
Part one is poetry and slogans and gibberish. Parts two and three, however, are all science, dealing with issues in the design and construction of ICBMs.
The loud import of parts two and three is that Russia evidently cannot, even in their wildest dream, hit the broad side of a barn. Or, as they put it in the movie, their missiles are incapable of 'hitting Nevada on a clear day'.
So this should be good news, right? So there's no nuclear threat then, is there? They learn, through Barley, that Katya's friend, her first-ever lover long ago, dating from the very night Russia and other Warsaw Pact countries crossed over into Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968, a gent called 'Dante' by his friends, is none other than the Russian science superstar Savelyev.
It turns out that Dante met Barley several months earlier at Peredelkino, the Russian state-sponsored haven for gifted writers (like Pasternak who's buried on the premises). Dante's heard a boozy Barley going on at one of their parties, heard him playing 'Ain't Misbehavin' on a paper comb for the group, and heard him then launch into a speech about how 'all victims are equal' and about how 'everyone has to betray their country to save it'. Barley's rant concludes with:
'Nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being.'
Barley goes for a walk after his 'performance' and visits the grave of Pasternak. Dante follows after him and gets him to agree that if he, Dante, ever does do something heroic, then Barley will behave as a merely decent human being.
Which brings us back to the present and Katya and the book Niki Landau takes to London.
So the Brits and the yanks learn that Dante is really science superstar Savelyev, the data in parts two and three are probably the genuine article, so that spells the end of Cold War tensions, right?
A bit more context. John Badham's WarGames comes out in 1983. What wasn't known at the time was that there rarely were launch codes as exotic as 'CPE1704TKS'. The gear left the factory with the field zeroed out and was rarely changed.
The yanks brought into the Barley/Katya case aren't happy yet. So Barley gets transported to the US (looks like Maine) where he's interrogated by a couple of arse-wipes (the actors do a good job here) and given a lie detector test (which he passes with flying colours).
So that's all you need to know. No further spoilers, most likely.
But, it must be said, there's something wrong with that picture. The movie's not the book, and Cornwell (le Carré) has talked about the book in a BBC documentary, so it's possible he overlooked the obvious.
The general idea:
All these social and corporate structures are pathologically hierarchical. Dante's working in a lab in Eastiski Jesuski, an outpost past Siberia, and he has a boss. And that boss has a boss and so forth, a Russian doll of bosses all the way back to Red Square.
These bosses love good news and they hate bad news. So each of their subordinates, all the way down to Dante, is going to sugar-coat their progress reports so things look a bit sweeter than they really are. The sugar coating will of course accumulate going up the food chain, to the point that the final report in the capital bears no resemblance to the actual truth.
And that's what's upsetting Dante. Dante wants his book published so he can end the Cold War.
So why do the yanks freak out?
The movie offers one explicit reason: the Military Industrial Complex, Ike's infamous phantom. Nobody will need their junk anymore. Nobody needs it. Their cash cow's gone.
But there's a far darker reason, whether it's mentioned in the book or not. Namely that the junk being peddled stateside is no better. That this junk building up on both sides is all shit and no more. That all it does is waste a lot of money to make a select few obscenely rich, at the expense of Joe Blogs who's so terrified out of his skin that he votes to support the nonsense.
Which is basically where we're at anyway, as nuclear weapons haven't been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thankfully. So you gotta wonder. And this book and its movie put it all in a bit of perspective.
The amount spent on weapons we don't need, will never conceivably need, should never need, is beyond staggering. It's wealth taken away from us, and at the cost of continually keeping us terrified. We might not think about it all the time - who could - but the thought is there. Rightfully or not, it's a scam that hurts us, that harms us, that threatens us.
We've seen some of the military capabilities of the US in the first war in Iraq (Kuwait). That stuff seemed to work OK. We didn't see any ICBMs flying, but whatever. We see what Russia can do today with their hypersonic missiles. And they tell us that their latest ICBMs can fly to the US from around the South Pole and thereby completely evade NORAD. Putin's been hard at work since his 2007 speech fell on deaf years. Russia had no way to stand up to the US in 2007 but today, fifteen years later, the US has no way to stand up to Russia. (And we don't see Russia or Putin pushing their weight around very much, and there's not a lot the US could do about it if they did. But whatever.)
In 1945, Hirohito begs Truman to help him force the Japanese military to capitulate. Four times. Had FDR still been around, it would have been a done deal. If Henry Wallace had still been VP and FDR had passed away, it would still have been a done deal. Which is why FDR's party colleagues wanted Truman instead. With FDR gone, the joint chiefs essentially took over the White House.
Truman never responded to Hirohito. Hirohito was ignored. Oppenheimer wasn't finished with his deadly toy, and the joint chiefs wanted to blow up one of those bombs and kill some fucking slant-eyes. That wasn't a demonstration for the Japanese - the Japanese already knew. That was a demonstration for the Soviets.
And here we are today. Lesley Stahl, talking with a DC-based weapons contractor, can't believe how easy it is for those companies to recruit retiring brass.
'We think that someone of your stature and integrity could do great things for us.'
That's it. A cushy pension supplement awaits.
The yanks have always been out in front, the Russkies have always played catch-up. The Russkies might occasionally get a temporary lead in some area, but it doesn't matter. What matters is to portray them as way ahead in Washington. For it's not only about fudging stats on weapons quality, but also about fudging the need for those weapons in the first place.
Ever seen this sign?
We don't have too many of them in Scandinavia. They sure did in the US, we're told. School kids rehearsing for nuclear attacks. Close all windows, everybody into the corridors, radio programmes interrupted by sirens, kids on the floor, backs to the wall, legs up, heads down, between your knees, cover your necks with your hands.
'This has been a drill. Only a drill. Had this been a real attack...'
Gorby came to Cambridge. We found out by accident. He had a peace research institute there. And his snoozer 'Memoirs' had just gone on sale. We bought four copies. Not because we wanted to read them but because there was an opportunity to meet the man. And shake his hand. And thank him for helping bring an end to the Cold War.
Удобно. Udobno. It translates differently depending on. Le Carré heard that it meant both 'convenient' and 'proper' in English. Today it translates as 'comfortable' or 'easy'.
Everywhere Barley and Katya go, she keeps telling him things are 'convenient' or not 'convenient'. Barley suggests that a better translation might be 'proper'. No, insists Katya, not 'proper' - 'convenient'.
The movie was shot on location. The cast and crew spent quite some time there. Sean Connery plays a Brit, so no language or culture challenge for him. But Katya is Russian - deep in her roots - and yet Michelle Pfeiffer carries it off with unexpected accuracy. Her accent is good, the dialogue in Russian she's given is good - she makes remarks to her children in Russian. She's very good.
But more than that: she encapsulates the Russian spirit, both its melancholy and its stoic determination. There are critics who don't agree, but she got a Golden Globes nomination for that role, a nomination she richly deserved.
But Katya is not Michelle. Michelle is from Santa Ana California. Katya is theoretically from Moscow perhaps, but in reality doesn't exist. But the character Michelle brings to life is very real.
After meeting four times in Moscow, Katya brings Barley home to her flat where she lives with her two pre-teen children and Uncle Matvey. You get to see her messing about in the kitchen, hear Uncle Matvey go on about all his favourite British crime novelists, and, as she tells Barley what Matvey, who doesn't speak a word of English, is going on about, Barley (Connery) talks over her, right out of the blue, telling her that he loves her. For 007, this is quite something. It's a hard scene to pull off, but Connery pulls it off.
At first Katya tries not to listen. She's explaining what Matvey said about the siege of Leningrad.
Finally back at the dishes again, she says:
'I hope you are not being frivolous, Barley. My life now only has room for truth.'
Later, when Uncle Matvey and the children are asleep and she and Barley sit at the edge of her bed, she explains that they must be quiet, and, if anyone stirs, must dress quickly and act 'serious'.
'I'll tell your children I love you', Barley tells her.
'I shall not interpret', she tells him.
'Can I tell you?'
'Yes, but you must do so quietly.'
Critics wrote of Pfeiffer that her accent was 'flawlessly in place'. But it's more than an 'accent'. Directors have noticed how much Pfeiffer can convey in a look, an expression, this despite not being a rigorously trained actress (even though she met her first husband in acting class). And it's true. And, for this movie, it's so important.
To be able to convey... As she said of Russians she met in the BBC documentary: their faces are stoic, their expressions don't change, suddenly they're telling you a traumatic story, of which they all have many, and the tears start running down their faces, yet their expressions still don't change...
Pfeiffer's supposedly the inspiration for Ally McBeal, created by her husband of thirty years, David E Kelley.
OK, a bit of a spoiler. This: Le Carré's books don't always have happy endings, but this one does. As one critic writes:
'You can easily imagine these two sharing a life after the credits roll.'
Yes - but where? Perhaps it doesn't matter?
There's so much history in Russia. The architecture bamboozled director Fred Schepisi. The vistas are too wide even for CinemaScope. Russia itself is big. Russia isn't just another country - it's another world, as Connery says. When you enter from Finland and stand there at the border and realise it goes on halfway around the world, to Alaska...
Don't miss the Winter Palace, and go out back, to Дворцовая Площадь, to Palace Square. People are small in a context like that. Katya is small and she knows it. She accepts it. But she's strong.
Katya knows her place in the great scheme of things. You'll never know much about what's going on in her mind, she's very quiet, a very pensive person, but she'll be there. She's suffered a lot, but she still has love in her. And joy too. She's human. She's Russian.