Éric Rochant’s series about French agents who live for years under false names is patient, exact and quietly frightening, with Mathieu Kassovitz at its centre. Fifty hours of offices, waiting and careful lying; only the last stretch of the final season loses its footing.
The Bureau of Legends is the department of France’s foreign intelligence service that sends people abroad under invented names and then, when they come home, has to take the name back. Éric Rochant’s series, written with Camille de Castelnau, Capucine Rochant and Jacques Audiard, runs five seasons of ten episodes from 27 April 2015. Our verdict is plain. It is one of the two or three best spy series we have seen, and it earns nearly all of its fifty hours. The exception is the end of the fifth season.
Mathieu Kassovitz plays Guillaume Debailly, codename Malotru, who has spent six years in Damascus as a teacher called Paul Lefebvre and is now expected to become himself again. Kassovitz gives him almost nothing to do with his face. He listens, agrees, waits, and answers a question with a slightly smaller question. About twenty minutes into the first episode we realised we had started to trust him, and a moment later that the trust was the exercise. The series does to us what Malotru does to everyone he meets.
The office is the point. Rochant shoots the Bureau as a place of grey partitions, strip lighting and badge readers, where the drama is a meeting about whether to spend money. Jean-Pierre Darroussin runs it as Henri Duflot, tired, decent, a man who protects his agents by seeming not to. Florence Loiret Caille’s Marie-Jeanne Duthilleul is the handler who says almost nothing. Léa Drucker’s Docteur Balmes is the service psychologist whose job is to read faces, and Malotru has to sit opposite her and lie.
Alongside him the series trains a recruit. Sara Giraudeau’s Marina Loiseau is being built a life as a seismologist for a posting in Iran, and Giraudeau plays her as small, quick and not yet good at this. In the first season she is put through a mock interrogation, and it frightened us more than any chase we can remember. A man asks her the same question in a different order until she cannot remember which answer was hers. Robin Coudert’s music, a low electronic pulse, comes in under scenes like that one and tells you something is happening.
Later seasons widen the map without changing the method. Oleksiy Gorbunov’s Mikhaël Kharlov is a Russian counterpart with a wet smile and a way of making a threat sound like sympathy. Mathieu Amalric arrives as JJA, the internal security man who suspects the entire building, and plays him with the pleasure of someone who has read every file. Louis Garrel’s Mille Sabords is another agent under cover, and Stefan Crepon’s Pacemaker supplies the only jokes without ever checking whether we got them.
It has faults. The love affair with Nadia El Mansour (Zineb Triki) drives everything and is the thinnest thing in it; Triki does what can be done with a woman whose function is to be loved. The middle seasons settle into a shape, an agent in trouble abroad and the office arguing about whether to pull them out, and the argument is not always different enough. And the fifth season ends in a way we will not describe, in episodes directed by Jacques Audiard. They are looser, warmer and more romantic than anything before them, and feel like a different series. We took it as a mistake, and a forgivable one after 48 hours of steady nerve.
British spy fiction gives you the mole hunt and the confession in a country house. American series give you the bomb under the city. Rochant gives you a man filling in an expenses form for a hotel where he met a woman he was not supposed to meet, and makes that the most dangerous thing in the episode.
Watch it in French with the subtitles on; the pauses are half the writing, and a dub would fill them. Fifty episodes at 55 minutes each is a real commitment. Give it three episodes. If by then the sight of a man checking a hotel corridor twice before he opens a door does not tighten your chest, it is not for you.
