The dragonfly (film)
Movie | |
---|---|
German title | The dragonfly |
Original title | The Little Drummer Girl |
Country of production | United States |
original language | English |
Publishing year | 1984 |
length | 130 minutes |
Age rating | FSK 16 |
Rod | |
Director | George Roy Hill |
script | Loring almond |
production | Robert L. Crawford |
music | Dave Grusin |
camera | Wolfgang Treu |
cut | William H. Reynolds |
occupation | |
|
The dragonfly (original title: The Little Drummer Girl ) is a film by the American director George Roy Hill from 1984 with Diane Keaton as Israeli agent Charlie and Klaus Kinski as chief of intelligence in the leading roles. The film is based on the 1983 novel of the same name by the English author John le Carré and is set against the background of the Middle East conflict .
action
In Bad Godesberg, terrorists use a suitcase bomb to blow up a residential building in which there are children as well as an Israeli diplomat.
After a change of scene you can see the American actress Charlie acting on a small London theater stage. In the audience sits an Arab-looking man who will later contact you on behalf of the Israeli secret service.
The politically far left and strictly anti-Zionist Charlie is opened in a Mossad base that she of all people can help prevent further bloodshed. Intelligence chief Martin Kurtz cleverly makes use of the breaks in the biography and personality of the American. Charlie is used as a decoy to get to Khalil, the head of the internationally operating and bombing Palestinian command. That requires smuggling into the terrorist organization and training in a military camp in the Middle East. In fact, Charlie succeeds in winning the trust of Khalil, who is planning a new assassination attempt in Freiburg im Breisgau . Khalil's command center is in a house in the Black Forest, and that's where Charlie delivers the top terrorists to the Mossad agents, who immediately liquidate him.
The traumatized Charlie goes back to London. In the final scene you can see her walking out into the night with the Mossad agent Joseph, the man who once contacted her.
Reviews
At the time, the dragonfly was largely received critically in the film reviews. Typical of the contemporary reception is the review by Roger Ebert , to whom the adaptation of the novel and the casting of the main roles seemed to have failed.
Almost 25 years later (2008) Dominik Graf came to a different and much more positive result in a review published in the FAZ: "'The Little Drummer Girl' [...] is exactly the kind of mainstream film that one longs for in the cinema [ …]: The film is intelligent, tricky, funny, sexy, honest, cruel - and it is emotionally located on a darker, but all the more touching level than the usual blockbuster. "Hill demonstrates, according to Dominik Graf, who is also a director. "A multi-layered mainstream product", which precisely because of its "expensive, very complex nature [...] will fail commercially at all times and is therefore doomed to the eternally recurring heroic death at the box office."
In 2018 the material was filmed again as a six-part television series with Florence Pugh , Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Shannon in the leading roles; Directed by Chan-wook Park .
literature
- Dominik Graf: In the cemetery of forgotten films , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 6, 2008, p. 38
Web links
- The dragonfly in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chicago Sun Times: The Little Drummer Girl
- ^ Graf 2008
- ↑ The Little Drummer Girl (TV Mini-Series 2018–). In: imdb.com. Retrieved December 21, 2018 .