Drop Everything and Start Watching The Bureau

Acara mata-mata yang berlatar belakang Perang Melawan Teror tidak memiliki rekam jejak yang bagus sebagai genre TV: Homeland memiliki kritikus yang bertanya "di mana kesalahannya" tujuh tahun sebelum akhirnya ditayangkan; fantasi balas dendam era Bush dari 24 mual pada saat itu dan benar-benar menjijikkan dalam retrospeksi. Tetapi mencampurkan realisme yang berpasir dan tulisan yang bagus untuk mengangkat genre yang menarik ke ketinggian yang tidak terduga adalah resep yang terbukti untuk TV hebat, dan bukan hiperbola untuk mengatakan bahwa apa yang dilakukan The Wire untuk acara polisi, drama Prancis Le Bureau lakukan untuk yang ke-21. drama spionase abad. Ini penting streaming, titik.

https://csupalliativecare.instructure.com/eportfolios/30509/Home/_2020_
https://csupalliativecare.instructure.com/eportfolios/30510/Home/__2020_1080P
https://csupalliativecare.instructure.com/eportfolios/30511/Home/ __HD_
https://csupalliativecare.instructure.com/eportfolios/30512/Home/Demon_Slayer_Kimetsu_no_Yaiba_
https://csupalliativecare.instructure.com/eportfolios/30513/Home/HK__

 

The show’s center is Guillaume Debailly, alias Malotru, a talented and respected spy for the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA. After a six-year deep-cover mission in Syria, he has just returned to headquarters, in Paris. Down the hall, a rookie Frenchwoman is preparing to go undercover in Iran, and her coworkers are panicking because an agent in Algeria has gotten drunk and disappeared into an Algiers police station.

While abroad, Malotru has concealed the depths of his feelings for Nadia El Mansour, a beautiful, married Syrian history professor. When he learns that Nadia is in Paris, he breaks protocol to revive his undercover identity for a hotel-room liaison—at which point shit hits the fan and doesn’t stop hitting it for 50 episodes and counting.

Le Bureau is a huge international hit: It’s airing in more than 100 countries; Le Figaro called it the best French show ever; The New York Times named it the third-best international series of the last decade. But it hasn’t quite taken off in the U.S., which is a shame—but understandable, because The Bureau has a couple of serious factors working against it in the American market.

The first is that, for the moment, it’s stuck in the streaming minor leagues on Sundance Now. But I promise this show is worth the $7 a month it’ll cost while you’re watching it—and don’t cancel before also plowing through another underrated highbrow spy thriller, Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s sensational miniseries adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl. (That one’s an even easier sell—a sexy ‘70s Mossad honeypot scheme starring pre-fame Florence Pugh!)

The second issue keeping The Bureau from going fully mass is that the whole thing is in French. But the show would still involve lots of subtitles even if you parlez parfaitement, because it has a real commitment to inclusion of the languages—Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Russian, and so on—that come up in the course of 21st century French intelligence work. It even includes long scenes of non-native English speakers communicating haltingly in their only shared language, an incredibly bold and realistic dramatic choice that somehow pays off.

Bold realism is what makes Le Bureau work in general: there’s the odd explosion and gunshot, but for the most part the show embraces the grim, fluorescently-lit milieu of actual spycraft: a stressed out and sloppily-dressed handler spending hours staring at the GPS location of a source’s phone; a team making sure an agent can get drunk without blowing her cover by making her answer questions in an office while she takes shots until she pukes. The level of realism isn’t just pointless in-the-weeds nerd fodder—it creates complex, believable characters and situations, and a feeling of recognition even in high-stakes plot lines. (You may not have overseen the recovery of an ISIS hostage, but you’ve probably been excluded from a meeting out of petty office politics.) You don’t have to take my word for it: when showrunner Eric Rochant screened the first two episodes for 300 DGSE employees, he got a standing ovation.

Plus, my God, is this show French. It’s simply taken for granted that everyone is incredibly horny in the workplace, there’s a tense scene in the DGSE cafeteria where one character eats his fries with a fork, and the DGSE spends a lot of energy causing trouble in Algeria and Syria, two places with brutal legacies of French colonialism. It all adds up to a fascinating glimpse of how the French see themselves in the world, and how they regard American power. (One particularly revealing choice is that a brash CIA agent is played with a somewhat absurd Texas affect by Brad Leland—Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights.)

If the show has a political stance, it’s a kind of exhausted nihilism. (Again, how French.) The terrorists and strongmen the DSGE is fighting are vicious—but the DGSE operators don’t flinch at putting innocent people in harm’s way, either. That evenhanded presentation extends to the far-flung locations where the DGSE’s spying happens: where sloppier shows are all minarets and a cheesy “exotic” soundtrack, here the Middle East is presented as simply another place, where people have a similar mix of fears and ambitions as anywhere else. Conversely, the show’s favorite head-fake is an ominous and ambiguous establishing shot of high masonry walls and barbed wire—that turns out to be not a terrorist hideout but the DGSE headquarters in Paris.

Jika serial tersebut memiliki garis moral, itu ditemukan dalam penggambaran bahaya yang disebabkan oleh pekerjaan intelijen kepada siapa pun yang mendekatinya. Itu juga berlaku untuk desk jockey di markas DGSE. Mereka merencanakan dan memanipulasi untuk memajukan keamanan nasional Prancis, tetapi mereka juga cukup sering melakukannya untuk menyembunyikan kekacauan dari bos mereka.

The Bureau, pada dasarnya, adalah drama di tempat kerja yang kebetulan berlatar di kantor paranoid yang unik. Sama seperti The Sopranos mengeluarkan semua romantisme dari kerumunan, Biro melakukan trik serupa dengan spionase internasional. Dan apa pun yang Anda lakukan untuk mencari nafkah, setelah menyelesaikan sebuah episode, begitu jantung Anda berhenti berdebar-debar, Anda akan sangat senang bahwa Anda bukan mata-mata.