Review | What to stream this weekend: John le Carré’s final interview, with Errol Morris in Apple TV+ documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, is full of intrigue
- Spy novelist John le Carré is mesmerising in Apple TV+ documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, which features an interview with Errol Morris – his last before he died
- Meanwhile, K-drama meets spaghetti Western in Netflix show Song of the Bandits, which sees good and bad bandits duke it out in early 20th-century Korea
One wonders if Apple TV+ documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, comprising John le Carré’s final interview, was intended (by him) to be a valediction forbidding – or even encouraging – mourning.
At once reclusive and familiar, recognisable but unknowable, novelist le Carré, who gave us The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963); Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and A Perfect Spy (1986), among many other lauded works, died in 2020, almost three years before the release of this 94-minute … what?
Perhaps that is what le Carré genuinely does – while still giving away little personal information we have not heard before and combining it with unrelenting deflection.
Le Carré offers innumerable lurid insights into the life and disreputable times of his con man and convict father, suggesting that his influence greatly informed his son’s career.
Seated alone as in a cell, being questioned by an unseen (by us) interrogator, le Carré is mesmerising throughout: authoritative, considered, calm and credible. But is it all just part of deception’s cloak?
Clips from adaptations and specially commissioned dramatisations allow enjoyable side trips into the life and crimes of le Carré’s characters. But for the celebrity obsessed, desiring proximity to the man himself, the duality between what we think might be factual and what we suspect is invention is exasperating.
This was, remember, a man who had two names and two identities, David Cornwell having been his real (?) self.
Thanks to his novel The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which is partly set in Hong Kong, le Carré is guaranteed a place in the city’s literary legend. And for him, unlike some of his grubbier secret agents, those pigeons are never coming home to roost.
A fistful of won
It is the early 20th century and the Joseon kingdom has been annexed by Japan, but Korean militias continue to fight for independence. Also bristling with arms and attitude are the good bandits and the bad bandits.
The latter, the mounted bandits, are opportunist murderers and thieves; the former, assembled by Lee Yoon (Kim Nam-gil), are fighting more honourably, for a restored Joseon for the oppressed.
Lee, a Joseon native and ex-Japanese army soldier, is making amends for his role in a civilian massacre years earlier. His colourful, rag-tag outfit features an ex-circus clown who is so acrobatic he can dodge bullets and an opium-addict marksman who requires a fix to shoot straight.
An implacable assassin, Eon-nyeon has promised to kill Lee somehow, somewhere. But first, there is the resistance to help out, notably along with Nam Hee-shin (Seohyun), a railway company boss and seemingly a loyal Japanese subject, but really an undercover Joseon rebel.
Adding even more spice to the pot is Nam’s relationship with vicious Japanese army major Lee Gwang-il (Lee Hyun-wook) who, besotted, fails to realise he is being played.
Offering the sort of big-budget cinematography that is wasted on a small screen, nine-chapter Song of the Bandits is a busy Eastern Western that calls a rousing, all-action tune.
