'Tailor' pops seams of spy genre
Based on Le Carre's bestseller "The Tailor of Panama," and like the new Berlin fest center itself -- an instant city in the Potsdamer Platz of gleaming high-tech, capitalist edifices such as the Sony Center, Berlinale Palace, Hyatt, Madison and more -- it's a colorful, wild riff on post-Cold War geopolitics.
Sitting at one of the new Berlin glamour spots, the Havana Lounge, Le Carre describes this neue Berlin as "a hybrid of stateless modernity and uncomfortable historical relics," and he seems to relish the incongruities .
"You drift into an unrestored square, and you're back behind the Iron Curtain 30 years ago," he muses. "You turn a corner, and there's the Wall staring at you -- never mind that it's been pulled down."
Agent of revision
What Boorman has also "pulled down" with co-screenwriter and producer Le Carre are the conventions of the modern spy film. "Tailor" is an original take on a genre that has become mechanical and soulless, dominated by stunts, gimmicks and cliches.
"Tailor's" greatest achievement is the total deconstruction of the Bond hero at the hands of its co-star -- and current James Bond -- Pierce Brosnan.
His MI6 spook, Andy Osnard, is, to put it indelicately, since the movie does at every turn, "The Spy Who Fucked Me." He's either rutting (preferably with the spouse of an associate), dreaming of rutting, rudely attempting a rut or watching others rut.Boorman's delight in pitting this seedy, horny Lothario against Geoffrey Rush's frantic, hapless Harry Pendel -- the "Tailor" of the title -- is in every frame of the film and every word of our conversation after the screening. And he's keenly aware that he's given Columbia Pictures a bit of what we'll politely call a marketing challenge.
Elusive auds
"I'd hate to be the guy who makes the decision on which picture to make," says Boorman, polite and unflappable in the face of the media and critical scrutiny that only a competition slot at a major fest brings. His film has divided audiences and critics, and in a way that adds more confusion to Columbia's plans for a global rollout.
Most German critics hailed the pleasantly conventional Dogma 95 picture "Italian for Beginners" and railed against "Tailor." But "Tailor" drew some rhapsodic praise from Stateside critics, including Variety's David Stratton, who called it "a stylish, sardonic addition to the spy genre."
Just as Le Carre can succinctly and poetically scan the monumental changes wrought by the fall of Communism in a few words, Boorman quickly sums up the changes wrought by what he sees as the triumph of corporate control of moviemaking.
Subversive tack
"In the '70s," recalls the vet helmer of "Deliverance," "Excalibur," "The Emerald Forest" and "Point Blank," "there was the general belief that if you made an original movie it would succeed. That was the challenge. Today, that's gone. Since the rule seems to be that you must make something that's familiar, the challenge is to make a picture that seems familiar, but to subvert it."
With Boorman having done exactly that with "Tailor," Columbia faces a distinct challenge in marketing the work. Indeed, the pic has already run into trouble at test screenings.
"They brought people in by asking if they wanted to see Pierce Brosnan playing a spy," says Boorman. "Then they saw him playing the anti-Bond. At the beginning of the film, they refused to believe their eyes, and then they saw him continue to do all these truly evil things and, well, it's a disappointment."
Boorman has tinkered with "Tailor" since those tests, but Brosnan's Osnard is still a wonderfully unrepentant and unredeemed louse. The thesp should get some kind of special award for taking his carefully created image as Bond and chucking it like a spent Cohiba.
Testing range
Acknowleding a fear that for the studio's desperately sought younger audience, "the idea of the political is outside their experience," Boorman is philosophical about the film's fate now restingon a house of testing cards.
"I think it's pseudo-scientific and self-fulfilling," complains Boorman. "If a film doesn't do well in the tests, then marketing doesn't get behind it, so it doesn't do well. It's an alibi."
Not unlike Le Carre's George Smiley, Boorman is the pro who's fully aware of the ironies inherent in his profession and his ownbeliefs.
"If Hollywood made the movies we like, we'd have nothing to fight against," Boorman says ruefully.
