It’s been a funny old month for Eva Green. The French actor has been all over the front pages for her court appearances during a legal dispute over a film that never was; her mortifying WhatApp messages displayed for all to see. The words “peasants” and “pure vomit” have been thrown about with impunity – in short, it’s publicity gold.
However embarrassing for Green, this is clearly a good time to have her as the leading actress in your TV drama. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough to distract from the fact that Apple TV’s new six-part thriller Liaison isn’t as thrilling as it might be.
Green stars as Alison Rowdy, a London-based agent who works for the British government. Vincent Cassel – exhibiting little of that famed charisma – stars as Gabriel Delage, a mercenary who used to work for the Direction Générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE), the French MI6. They have a tangled history that starts to become more apparent – and more important – with each episode.
The duo are at the centre of several intertwining storylines: the first being a high-level cyber attack in London that starts to cause serious problems. The British want to sign up to Europe’s cybersecurity agency in the wake of the hack, but this isn’t a straightforward task in a post-Brexit world. There are numerous slippery bureaucrats pulling all sorts of strings behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, Syrian refugee hackers stumble across some covetable intelligence which then makes them international targets. Gabriel is hired to find them by a crooked player inside the French government – the fear is that they’ll hand their findings over to the British.
All the while it’s never quite clear where Alison and Gabriel’s allegiances really lie, which is partly down to Green and Cassel’s on-screen chemistry – it’s not fizzing but it’s certainly persuasive. Green, though sometimes overly pouty, does a good job as an agent pulled between her past and her present.
Liaison is certainly glossy, well-filmed and generally well-edited – in fact, London has rarely looked so good. Director Stephen Hopkins, who directed Predator 2 as well as some early episodes of spy drama 24, has done a good job at pacing too, and the series never feels boring as scenes move from London to Dunkirk to the Middle East.
Mostly though, the issue is with some of the plot devices; it’s let down by a series of frustratingly unlikely situations. Small things, but pull at that thread and it can’t help but unravel much of the tension for the viewer.
What are the chances that an agent’s step-daughter would be in the exact train carriage where the impact of an attack is most felt? Would a British agent – after it emerged they were alone at a crime scene with a most-wanted criminal – really be permitted to continue her duties without being suspended or at least questioned? Would Gabriel come right up to Alison’s window at home and stare at her in the rain, as she stares back? The show would have benefited hugely by being tightened up just a bit.
Liaison sets itself up as a real world thriller (beyond the stars, who are operatives in the field, these are normal-looking civil servants, working in a normal office, conducting meetings and diplomatic engagements in Brussels) and each improbable situation distracts the viewer. Given it was written by Virginie Brac who worked on the superb Canal+ French police thriller Engrenages (Spiral) this is a particular letdown.
This slight clunkiness is later reflected in some of the dialogue, particularly around any cross-Channel Brexit tensions, “Our British friends, always want to have their cake and eat it,” smirks a French official at one point. What’s the French for cliché?
