[CRITICAL] A TRAITOR IDEAL

Whether in literature or cinema, the genre of the polar black is accessibility in order to appeal to a public increasingly wide. The codes of the genre are widely known, and it is today very easy to fall into all the pitfalls of narrative : writing of the characters, place surveys, formalism aesthetics, photographs of situations… for example, the first season of True Detective, the highly effective La Isla Minima or, more recently, Triple 9 came skillfully played of these characteristics to construct a narrative panting and suffocating. If there was a gallery of characters typical of the film noir (cop divorced and/or tortured, political, corrupt, mafia, foreign…), the staging managed to bring his works to a level well above the classic thriller Saturday night. This is not the case ofA TRAITOR, IDEAL, polar of a rare laziness coupled with a adaptation, which will certainly not live up to John Le Carré.

As usual, when a film is not an end in itself, we will sell it because “it is the author who offered you The Mole” or the director remarked a few years ago with a film solid. Often, the presence of this phrase on the posters visible from the corridors of the underground networks is a bad sign. This last – writer – has become the darling of the studios, the producers of spy movies. After The Mole, A man very sought-after, so here are A TRAITOR IDEAL directed by Susanna White.

Contrary to what one can usually say of a thriller “of good quality“, A TRAITOR IDEAL does not meet the specifications and does not work. The novels of John Le Carré often make use of the inner workings of very complex sub-plots carried out by the characters written with astonishing accuracy. What more can we say, therefore, of this adaptation if it is not that it is disappointing and unnecessarily ultimate ? Situations the credibility of this narrative is close to nil by way of a table of the grotesque characters in the manichaean everything must come out of a parody, A TRAITOR IDEAL accumulates the errors. As for the plot itself, she will suffer of the comparison with the novel, even when an adaptation is assessed as such. But the fact is there : in the absence of a strong narrative, the film loses the viewer despite the putassière presence of scenes explanatory out of nowhere. Other times will totally sink A TRAITOR IDEAL in a mixture infects swirling of commonplaces, where, in particular, the suburbs of paris will still be honored. And it is terribly disappointing on the part of Hossein Amini, screenwriter acclaimed for Drive.

“Flat, without ambitions, and executed in lazy, A Traitor Ideal annoys more than it entertains.”

In front of a casting tantalizing, the big black point of the film, it shows gradually the tip of his nose to the margin of a direction of the actors chaotic. Between a Ewan McGregor discredited and an insufferable Damian Lewis – yet great in Homeland – Stellan Skarsgård floats hardly in this film as hollow as implausible. Badly helped by a script that is misty, the group of starlets from hollywood does not convince. Under the direction of Susanna White, this small world is agitated, and was finally erased in front of the weak screenplay. While pursuing an ideal of film noir, there is nothing new or exciting, both in staging that schematic narrative. Indeed, the achievement of Susanna White remains a classic or even too academic for the genre (photography, dark, plans, oblique, music, heavy and stifling…) to default to find its own personality. Flat, without ambitions and running into laziness, A TRAITOR IDEAL annoys more than it entertains.

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