A stolidly old-fashioned, rather bafflingly preposterous spy-tale-slash-love-story is what this creaky film offers, directed by Sharim Sharif and adapted by the director from her own 2004 novel. It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance. It is like Jeffrey Archer with a twist.
The time frame flashes back and forth between the early 60s and the early 90s. In cold war America, ambitious young Russian diplomat Sacha (Sam Reid) has arrived with a trade delegation, planning to defect – but will his beautiful young wife Katya (Rebecca Ferguson) be able to escape with him? This story is interspersed with scenes from Glasnost Russia of 1992, in which old Sacha is played by Charles Dance and his young niece Lauren, an artist keen to discover the truth about her family, played again by Ferguson.
Whatever potential subtlety and complexity we are promised does not materialise — only hammy airport-bestseller histrionics, and the whole movie sometimes seems submerged in a kind of cold-tea sepia look, appropriate to its historical background.
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