Spy League poster
The end of the year is approaching, the new films in the cinema you sing and I appear, and the genre is more and more diverse, no longer the visual effects blockbuster dominates the world, such as the new films released this week, foreign movies alone have "Spy Alliance" and "Your Name". "Miss Pei's Fantasy Castle" three very different works. Among them, the most "fresh" is "Spy League", which was released on November 30 Chinese mainland, just one week away from the North American premiere, almost synchronous.
A true story that is more tragic than the movie
"Allied" was born out of a story that screenwriter Steven Knight heard from a neighbor thirty years ago that a British spy was ordered to kill his wife.
He had just graduated from the University of London and left London to go to the United States, working while traveling, planning to cross the United States. Along the way, he worked as a dishwasher, did renovation work, and picked cotton on the farm. At one point, he worked as a handyman at a cheap car inn in Arkansas that he later discovered was still an underground brothel. He had a neighbor at the time, an old lady who was also British, and her husband was an American soldier who came to the United States with her husband after World War II. She told Steven the story.
Stills from The League of Spies
During World War II, the old lady's brother was an officer in the British Special Operations Executive Department (SOE) and was ordered to carry out behind enemy lines in France. During the operation, he met a French girl who was a member of the French Resistance. The two fell in love, and the woman became pregnant. After completing his mission behind enemy lines, he obtained permission to organize and returned to England with his French lover. The Allies were planning the Normandy landings, but the family went to live in a small town in the south of England, and he switched to paperwork in the intelligence service.
One day, the Emperor told him that they had conclusive evidence that his French wife was actually a spy working for the Nazis, and that she had been a pawn in the French resistance ambush when the two had met. Today, she also sends all kinds of intelligence gathered from her husband to Berlin through secret radio.
His superiors ordered him to get rid of his wife when he came home from work that night. Only then can it be proved that he is not her accomplice. That night, he returned home, took the child in his wife's arms, drew a gun and killed her.
The story told by the grandmother left an indelible impression on Steven, but the two met in Pingshui, and he was not sure that the story was telling the truth. He tried many times, looking for clues to this incident in various texts related to the British Special Operations Executive Department, but he never found anything. Moreover, his own research found that the German army did not seem to have infiltrated the security services of the British mainland. Whether this story is just a story, he is still unsure.
But emotionally, he believed that grandma didn't have to make up such a tragic past about her family members. She said that after killing his wife, her brother returned to her mother's house that night, and she was also there, watching her brother in military uniform tearfully tell what she had done hours ago, a scene she will never forget.
Later, Steven returned to England to become a professional screenwriter, writing films such as "Beautiful Bad Things", "The Promise of the East", and "The Wrath of the Gods". In 2013, the British drama "Blood Gangster" created by him was broadcast on BBC 2 and gained great popularity. In the same year, he also wrote and directed the small-budget film "Locke", which became one of the focal points of the independent film industry that year. Steven, who was always busy with various projects, never forgot the world war memories he heard from the old lady when he was young.
In 2012, because of his work, he met Brad Pitt (Pitt's 2017 zombie world war 2 will be written by Stephen). During a chat, he told this story. Pete encouraged him to hurry up and write it out. Hence the current Spy League.
For the sake of film effect, the film we see today is slightly different from the story he first heard, but the core spirit has not changed, that is, the helpless situation faced by a man and woman who love each other in the war years.
Although love is moving, sadness is not enough to move
"Spy League" has a sufficiently insured creative team, in addition to the above-mentioned screenwriter Steven Knight, director Robert Zemeckis has filmed "Back to the Future", "Forrest Gump", "Desert Island Rest" and other masterpieces, rarely absurd, even if the previous work "Walking in the Clouds" box office is not as good as expected, but the reputation is still good. The two lead actors Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard are not bad in terms of acting skills in addition to topicality, a Venetian film emperor and an Oscar queen.
It is precisely because of the above combination that the filming of "Spy Alliance" like this makes me feel a little disappointed. When the film opens, the male protagonist finds a German officer who knows his true identity, and then easily kills him without leaving any worries, I have the ominous feeling of "pills", and the plot after that is indeed ...
According to this "sleeping with the enemy" plot direction, whether the story is clichéd or not, "Spy League" should be a movie full of dramatic tension. However, strangely enough, I never felt the tense atmosphere of the heart mentioning the throat eye, whether it was at the moment when the male protagonist was ordered to test his wife's bone eye, or at the moment when the true identity of the female protagonist was revealed.
The reason is that I think the film is too intoxicated with presenting the two of you and me, ignoring the heavy sense of mission carried by the protagonist and the entanglement that human nature naturally faces in the case of the two armies fighting for life and death. In fact, except for the old part where the male protagonist was injured, the film does not spend much space to show the war, and the air raid looks like fireworks. It is precisely because there is no cruelty of war as a foreshadowing, so the audience cannot feel the helplessness of the two protagonists as their masters, and even the infectious power of the tragic ending is a few points less.
In "Casablanca", which has a similar background, the male protagonist Rick said: "In this crazy world, we three little people don't think too much about this matter." It is precisely because it fully reflects the characteristics of the times and also shows the sincerity of emotions, both of which have achieved its classic status, and the audience will sigh for such an ending."
In addition, the logic of the behavior of the characters in "Spy League" does not stand up to scrutiny. In order to investigate the identity of the heroine, the male protagonist flew to France occupied by the German army, obviously in a hurry, he did not forget to risk killing a few more German soldiers, which shows how much he hated the Germans; but when the heroine showed off to him, he almost immediately forgave the heroine and prepared to run to the neutral country with a family of three. Not to mention the front-line soldiers who suffered because of the intelligence of the female protagonist, what were the tasks that the male protagonist risked his life to perform before, and what were the young pilots who died for the truth he wanted? In fact, if the ending of the movie is filmed according to the direction of the real story, it may be more shocking and meaningful.
Although "League of Spies" can't reach the heights of "Casablanca", the tone of the film is full of homage to the classic Hollywood love movie. Audiences who have a special love for such movies should be moved by the love of the male and female protagonists.
If you are a fan of the two protagonists, it is worth the ticket price. Blatter Pitt is handsome and manly in the film, and it is hard to believe that he is more than half a hundred years old. Marion Cotillard originally had a retro temperament of the Hollywood celebrities of the past, and every outfit that appeared on camera was beautiful and fitted, which made her shine even more.
If you have to be provocative in acting, as an intelligence agency officer, Pete can actually be more slippery; and the Cotillard performance, which is between disguised identity and real identity throughout the film, should be more layered, and it is impossible to perform the same style in front of her fake colleagues and fake husbands.
Although "Spy League" has many slots, it is not long before the North American release, and it is still satisfying to sit in a Chinese cinema and see this movie. I think a big reason for this is that China's Huahua Media is one of the investors in the film. When more and more Chinese film companies participate in Hollywood project venture capital, they are no longer limited to large-scale productions that emphasize visual effects, but also begin to favor medium-cost, plot-oriented works, and thanks to this, China's screen will become more and more diversified, and different types of audiences can choose their favorites. For the Hot Money Chinese Film Market, this is one of the benign effects that capital can bring.