Review of Spy City

Spy City (2020)
8/10
With the sobriety and effectiveness of the classic
24 August 2022
Summary

Spy City is a great series that recovers the classic and sober spirit of the spy movies and series of the time and place in which it takes place, the divided Berlin of 1961, in the middle of the Cold War, with all the secret services in dance and characters remarkable.

Review

Fielding Scott, an English spy (Dominic Cooper), is sent to Berlin in 1961 to rehabilitate himself as an agent and oversee the defection of an East German scientist to the West. This mission will give rise to the search for a traitor within the secret and diplomatic services of the allies.

Obviously, Spy City refers to Berlin, the city occupied and divided between the US, UK, France and East Germany under the orbit of the USSR, a key scene of the Cold War between Western powers capitalists and Soviet socialism.

The series remarkably recovers the spirit and style of the espionage stories of that time. The period reconstruction is so successful that at times we seem to be watching a Bond movie or an episode of The Avengers shot in that decade. The story is sober, the description of the characters adjusted, the plot intriguing, there is no self-awareness, the murders are very crude but without relish in the violence and the dialogues can reach moments of great subtlety for what they suggest. And something fundamental at this point: the characters speak in their native languages.

The story is a true festival of secret services and diplomats from the UK, USA, France and the Soviet Union: agents from MI6, the CIA, French spies, the Stasi (the secret service of the German Democratic Republic) will be present. , the KGB and recycled Nazis, with their approaches, negotiations and misgivings. Agent Fielding Scott's original mission derives from the unveiling of increasingly important and compromising issues with enormous political scope. His painting conforms to the genre, is far from Manichean, depicts very well the changing links between spies and their services and presents interesting characters, such as the French spy Madame Bloch (Romane Portail), Eliza Hahn, a Stasi spy (Leonie Benesch, de Baylon Barlin y The Crown), the photographer Ulrike Farber (Johanna Wokalek), the CIA agent Conrad Greer (Seumas F. Sargent), the head of the KGB in Berlin Viktor Kovrin (Nark Zak) and Scott himself, obsessed with clarifying the incident with the one that opens the series.
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