Love in the Time of Glasnost

As the Cold War entered its twilight and Gorbachev’s glasnost began to thaw decades of ideological frost, Australian director Fred Schepisi gave us ‘The Russia House’ (1990) from John le Carré’s 1989 novel - a bruised, adult meditation on trust and love, wrapped in the attire of a spy thriller.

While it proved too cerebral and ‘slow burn’ for most audiences at the time, it is time today to recognise Schepisi’s film as one of the most accomplished adaptations of a le Carré’s novel, surpassed only by The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) and the twin Alec Guinness-led BBC mini-series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.

Blessed with a cracking screenplay by Tom Stoppard, the central premise of ‘The Russia House’ is that decency requires sacrifice and that truth in a world of professional liars is the most dangerous thing of all. The result is not so much a thriller as a conversation between two weary cultures, carried out through jazz, vodka and the furtive optimism of people no longer quite sure what they believe in.

Barley Blair (played by Sean Connery) is no Bond. He is a man out of time, a dishevelled, jazz-loving, boozy London publisher who shambles through his own life with a blend of charm and remorse. Blair is drafted into an amateur game of espionage when a manuscript from a dissident Soviet physicist code-named ‘Dante’ (the magnetic Klaus Maria Brandauer) is delivered to him via a luminous Muscovite, Katya Orlova (Michelle Pfeiffer). The manuscript, a blueprint for the weakness of the Soviet military complex, threatens to disrupt the delicate detente.

But this is no standard spy caper. The real secrets here are emotional. What does it mean to risk oneself for another?  “Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being,” Barley declaims.

The Western intelligence services - British and American alike - are shown as bureaucratic machines blind to humanity (a running le Carrean theme since ‘The Spy who came in from the Cold’). And love, when it arrives, is “inconvenient” and ultimately redemptive.

Connery gives a performance of immense subtlety and self-effacement. His Barley is no action man, but a man of regrets, illusions and unexpected conviction. He is a man in late middle age grappling with the possibility that ideals can still matter. Pfeiffer, poised and tragic, makes Katya more than a cipher. Her strength is in her dignity and soft defiance of a system that devours its children. Together, they convey an intelligent, unshowy and profound middle-aged love rarely seen on screen (never mind espionage cinema).

Around them, the supporting cast hums with restrained brilliance. James Fox is splendid as the sympathetic spymaster Nedsky while Roy Scheider’s CIA man exudes that peculiar blend of charm and menace only an American can project in a le Carré story. The difference in spycraft cultures - patient British cynicism versus American pragmatism and force - is elegantly suggested rather than declaimed.

The film’s mood is immeasurably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s superb jazz-inflected score, featuring Branford Marsalis on the saxophone. The music itself is a lament - sinuous, melancholic and oddly hopeful. Ian Baker’s cinematography captures the wan, grey beauty of Moscow and Leningrad in the thaw of the Soviet empire’s last days. There is something elegiac about it all.

As the Cold War collapses not with a bang but a shrug, ‘The Russia House’ captures the existential confusion of a world that no longer knows how to divide right from wrong.

There are no heroes here, only fallible people navigating collapsing ideologies. The West’s self-congratulatory assumption that it has “won” the Cold War is gently punctured in Barley’s idealistic choice to sell the ‘shopping list’ to the Soviets to save Katya and her family - a decision driven by love and conscience, two things intelligence agencies across the world regard as liabilities.

Schepisi steers the film with unhurried elegance and intelligence, trusting in the power of silence, of glances held a second too long. That makes ‘The Russia House’ too slow for attention-deficit audiences raised on explosions and double-crosses. But for those attuned to its wavelength, it offers riches few thrillers even aspire to.

Thirty-five years on, The Russia House remains an anomaly - a thinking person’s spy film that also functions as a poignant love story, a cultural document and a farewell to a world that once seemed more morally navigable. It is time we gave it its due.