Between Atomic Blonde
and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I’m
really digging the “retro spy” genre – and I’m including throwback spy flicks
like Kingsman. There’s something very
satisfying about the technological limits placed on the story, which must
proceed without the advantages of cell phones and Wi-Fi; usually that careful
crafting leads to a more cerebral script – something I always appreciate – and
ends up having a trickle-down effect on the rest of the creative process. Going
into the theater, I hadn’t known that Atomic
Blonde was a period piece, nor had I realized quite how much I’d like the
film – both of which were welcome surprises.It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall is about to come down, and MI6 sends Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) behind the Iron Curtain to find a list of operatives stolen from a dead agent. Berlin station chief Percival (James McAvoy) helps her into East Berlin and enlists her help with East German defector Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who’s stolen the list. While Lorraine looks for the truth amid a dalliance with French operative Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), she begins to wonder who she can trust.
I was exhausted after Atomic Blonde – not because the movie was overlong or boring to the point that my hindquarters went numb, but because I’d had to keep up with the film’s sneaky storytelling while enduring the intense and enervating action sequences. Atomic Blonde is not a film that goes for easy moments; none of it looks effortless, and the audience has to work just as hard as Lorraine to discover the identity of Satchel, a traitor in the ranks of MI6. But at least we have the good fortune not to get in the middle of those fight scenes, because they’re incredibly vicious.
Director David Leitch has done a fair job of staging his action scenes like single takes; there’s some digital trickery, to be sure, but in the moment it looks as though these long fights are all done in a straight cinematic line. We’ve got two long and arresting fights staged in apartment buildings – one in the living room, one on the stairs – that most other directors might have done in forty-cuts-per-second shakycam, but Leitch’s patient attention to the intensity of the fights allows them to exhaust the moviegoer and the characters, whose breathy pauses and stumbles make the combat even more real. Brownie points are due to the storytellers who devised Lorraine’s creative uses of an extension cord, a record player, and a doorframe.
In the interminable wait for Bond 25 and the ever-present question of whether Daniel Craig will suit up once or twice more, Charlize Theron proves herself a capable “Lady Bond,” although that does a disservice to Lorraine Broughton. There are certain similarities – their capabilities in close combat, their equal dexterity in the art of seduction – but Lorraine almost feels more of a piece with Bryan Mills in Taken, possessed of a “certain set of skills” that make her unstoppable, even as the odds against her increase. She’s more vulnerable than Mills, though, emotionally and physically; her stake in this fight is personal, and her fling with Delphine seems more genuine than any Bond girl’s. Moreover, those moments where she picks herself off the floor and continues to fight, even as she’s bruised and short of breath, give the character a smartly-crafted strength.
The soundtrack to the film is a smashing mix tape of 80s tracks, and the cinematography is as unforgivingly fluorescent as I imagine the 1980s would have been. It all adds up to a nicely unified experience, where the stark white lights of an interrogation room echo the neon pipes of a Berlin hotel room. Amid it all, there is the brainy sense of needing to keep up and the fervent hope that, as the credits roll, this won’t be the last time we see Lorraine Broughton. I’m ready to enroll her in the same camp as Wonder Woman, welcome alternatives to the same-old/same-old dudes who have run these genres for fifty years. Roll on the new, but please give me a moment to catch my breath.
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