When I started to look about how to watch Tehran, it came to my attention that there may be another movie on a relatively similar bigger topic - the spy war between Iran and Israel: The Operative, directed by the Israeli film director Yuval Adler, that also directed the interesting movie Betlehem that I watched a couple of years ago, featuring two actors that will later be distributed in Fauda.
The 1h54m- movie, which was released in 2019 and presented at the Berlinale, and is available on Amazon Prime, is based on a novel by the Israeli author Yiftach Reicher-Atir, The English Teacher. Reicher-Atir was himself familiar with the intricacies of intelligence work and was part of the Operation Entebbe, the final format of the novel being edited dramatically by the intelligence agencies.
The movie adapted the book with relatively good results. I couldn´t say which version is the best, both in their own right being able to convene a complex story with interesting ethical and human questions.
Rachel, the main character played by the German-American Diane Kruger, who also had a role in Inglourious Basterds and was among others Helen in Troy. Daughter of a non-Jewish mother that spent some time in the kibbutzim in the 1970s and a Jewish anti-Zionist British professor, she is recruited to work for Mossad in Iran, as English teacher. There, in-between her operations, she falls in love with one of her targets. Then, suddenly disappears while her former lover is stuck in Germany in an attempt of recruitment.
I personally didn´t like the character, although was good played, but in fact it features a lot of complexities of working under pressure and being not always honestly acknowledged the risks of the work. Rachel was not prepared for the complex situations and practically abandoned to decide on herself when under high pressure to achieve her targets. On the other hand, she acted unprofessionally while falling in love with a local and even getting pregnant with him, a situation that her handler didn´t deal with it properly anyway - by not sharing the situation to his superiors. The price she was supposed to pay was elimination, but things are not always happening as in the intelligence scripts, because feelings may overcome the smart projections.
The Operative is a good movie. both in terms of the subject and the art of the actors. It has a completely different spin as Tehran and definitely a different audience but was equally worth to watch it.
Rating: 4 stars
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