The Bureau (2015; Season 1)

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The Bureau (2015; Season 1) – E. Rochant

I love a good spy yarn (epitomised by those great miniseries featuring Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1979; and Smiley’s People, 1982). Those complicated plots, with a harsh light cast on loyalty/disloyalty, truth/falsehood, secrecy/breach, are endlessly appealing. Anyone could be a mole, any mission could come a cropper – and in this compulsively watchable French series, failure is omnipresent. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Guillaume Debailly a.k.a. Malotru a.k.a. Paul Lefevbre who has recently returned to Paris from a six-year undercover operation in Damascus. He may have “alias syndrome”, a difficulty in giving up the freedom of being someone else – this is exacerbated when he accidentally runs into his lover (undercover lover?) from the Damascus days, Nadia el Monsour (Zineb Triki), now in Paris ostensibly involved in cultural exchange (but perhaps something else?). Although distracted, he is required to lead the DGSE (French Intelligence) in their search for an agent (“Cyclone”) who has gone missing in Algeria, possibly abducted, possibly a double agent. These parallel threads (the hunt for Cyclone, the entanglement with Syria) are joined by a third plot strand focused on a new agent, Marina Loiseau (Sara Giraudeau), who goes undercover as a seismology PhD student with the challenge of being selected to join a research team in Iran led by an Iranian professor visiting the Earth Science Institute in Paris. Each of these plots takes a winding and precipitous route through the 10 episodes of this first series – but shockingly only one of them resolves!  Now I’m invested and will have to move on to Season 2 (2016). Absorbing, escapist, filled with great acting and nary a false step.