(Text / Yang Shiyang)
Paul Lefebvre and his girlfriend in Damascus left without saying goodbye, and returned to Paris from Syria. This man who wore a suit and coat all day long, taciturn but elegant and dashing returned to the beautiful and secret office. Before that, his girlfriend in Damascus and most of the people in the war-torn city thought of this middle-aged man as a solid teacher and a self-confessed talented half-ass writer who possessed the peculiar redemption of Europeans. Heart and humanitarian spirit, in his spare time writing a book manuscript that will never be completed. But in fact, his name is not Paul Lefebvre, he may be Guillaume Debay, or it may be some other French name that is not very loud, when colleagues in the Paris office welcome him back, They also called him "rough guy" - this is his code name, this absurd and a bit nasty code name is the closest to his true identity. He is a French agent who serves a department known as the "Legendary Office", where everyone quietly operates a computer, answers calls, and remotely controls the fate and life of people thousands of kilometers away from France.
French dramas have always been overlooked, but this "Legendary Office" stands out with its unique temperament. The spy and agent theme is actually a less flattering setting, because its story is either too bizarre and will become a conspiracy theory, or it can only become a pointless fight and eventually slide into an action movie. interest and curiosity have been almost exhausted. But there is a type of secret agent-themed work that can always use a cold tone to bring this old and stereotyped theme back to life. The hard-line rebels and rescues themselves.
A few years ago, the famous AMC produced an American TV series "No Way Back". Its original English name was Rubicon, which meant "crossing the river." It's like people who don't exist, facing the suspicious eyes of family and friends, and using the data analyzed to determine the fate of countless lives in the continental United States or tens of thousands of kilometers away. It was a depressing story, tense, mysterious, and charming, but it somehow ended in one season. And this French drama "The Office of Legends" is like the French version of "No Way Back", without any exaggerated fighting, it is not even like "Homeland", which often arranges a hero soldier to tie a human bomb to the President of the United States Beside me, "The Office of Legends" uses a typical anti-dramatic form to achieve a special kind of drama. It completely eliminates the exaggerated legends and neat fights in 007 and "The Bourne Bourne", and replaces them with the operation of the brain. In other words, if most of the previous espionage genres have inevitably used the fight of courage as a refreshing bridge, this French series is obviously only happy to describe the fight of wits. This is why this drama, like the previous American drama "No Way Back", has seriously divided the audience. People who love it think it has a tense atmosphere, real and appropriate, and people who don't like it will only think its story is dull And repeat.
If the espionage stories like 007 and The Bourne Bourne still conform to the audience's external perspective, then the perspective of "The Office of Legends" is obviously more like something recorded by cameras placed inside the French secret service office. , it quietly shows people everything inside, the operation, the mechanism, the dilemma, the obstacles, the doubts, the competition between the rival forces and the calculations between the allies, and more importantly, it has been torturing the people from all over the world. How agents returning home from a mission deal with their fictional identities and real lives.
"The Office of Legends" contains several interrelated stories about a drunken agent who is arrested by local police and whose whereabouts are unknown. This incident has caused great trouble. One person's omission may involve the loss of control of all the layouts on a clue. More importantly, this agent has become a bargaining chip for some forces within the other government. France must try to find out what should be done. Which party to trust, how to deal with it, and what chips to use to replace it; at the same time, they are also assigning a female agent to Iran disguised as a seismologist, in order to find out the development process of the other party's nuclear weapons; In addition, a more important story involves whether the "rude" Paul Lefebvre really returned to reality after returning to China. This is one of the most feared things in this industry. The agents can't distinguish between fiction and reality, or they consciously don't want to return to reality. Once a person indulges in an identity for too long, people take everything they play for as truth, which is a hopeless paradox in a way, all their training is to hope that agents can actually believe and Immerse yourself in the fictional story, perform the fictional character perfectly, and handle the relationship with everyone around, so that everyone believes in the false name and false life, but they are people, not programs, once they are caught Recall, too easy to get lost.
This is a group of razor-edge creatures, fighting for their lives all day long.
The "rough man" did not give up the love that was born in Damascus. If there were still intelligence considerations at first, but later, a large part of his heart has been captured by true love. What's more, in the future, when the woman suffers because of herself, this man who should have a solid boundary begins to try to transcend certain boundaries that should not be touched...
The fascinating thing about "The Office of Legends" is the dangerous smell it exudes, the smell of life and death love, everything is swaying through the uncertainty of finding balance. Everyone was quiet and confident, but everyone was filled with fear and anxiety. This is the story of the real intelligence community, told in the most placid tones of thrilling, cold, hard, hopeless yet romantic.
(This article was first published in Beijing Youth Daily)
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