tinker tailor soldier spy (d tomas alfredson, w. bridget o'connor, peter straughan, le carré)

According to someone who works for the producers of this film, it had a lot of trouble getting financing. Which seems surprising. Because if this isn't a gold plated UK film concept then what is? It looks and feels like high quality Oscar bait. Which is both its strength and its weakness.

From an early shot of jet planes swooping over Budapest, pulling back to reveal schoolchildren in a bell tower cheering, it's clear that the director intends to pull out all the stops in order to beef up le Carré's famous text. It takes the folk-memory of a grey seventies London and makes it hyper-grey. The frames drip with what one assumes to be a meticulously graded lack of colour. With its Alpha role call of British male stars, the film comes at the viewer relentlessly, bludgeoning him or her into accepting that, yes, this is film-making at the top of its game.

Alfredson's breakthrough film was also set in the seventies, not that many noticed. HIs measured Scandanavian technique should be perfect for the convoluted, repressed world of British spies. And yet, in spite of its reasonable pacing and careful use of flashback, there's something slightly pedestrian about Tinker Tailor. One could say: that's the whole point, but le Carré's narrative seems to suggest it isn't. Where the British act as though they are insouciant functionaries, seeking to out-functionary their Soviet opponents, the reality is that their Christmas parties are a hotbed of seething passions and intimate tensions. When Firth's Bill Haydon tells Oldman's Smiley at the end that his seduction of Smiley's wife was "nothing personal", you can't help feeling that this could be yet another lie, another false move in the chess game these players have chosen to get caught up in.

All of which hints at the film's major weakness: we don't really know who these people are. With the exception of Smiley's passion for Anne and Ricki Tarr's tempestuous love affair, we learn nothing about their secret motivations and desires. So, when the house of cards comes down, and the denizens of the circus meet their fate, it's hard to care. (Idly I wonder what someone like Welles, with his flair for fleshing out minor characters, might have made of le Carré's book.)

Given this, and given the way in which Alfredson so brilliantly made us care about his vampires in Let The Right One In, one suspects he has been hamstrung by an efficient but prosaic script. Sensibly it puts much of the dramatic tension on Cumerbatch's shoulders as Guillam, but the brief scene where he appears to be cutting his ties with his lover offers a glimpse into the real deceptions and betrayals at work, underneath the more obvious games. The moment Strong's well acted Jim Prideaux catches Firth's eye at the Christmas party offers another hint.

Indeed, the Christmas party scenes, albeit filmed in a studiously observational style, are when the film really seems to come alive. The spooks playing their complex games are suddenly made human. The seventies setting rings entirely true; the shadow of the war fomenting both camaraderie and gloom, with the West far less better off in comparison to the East than it so earnestly believed. In these scenes those of us who were still in our childhood back in those days might catch a glimpse of the country we grew up in, one which is now unmourned and by and large forgotten. For all its slightly strident quality, it's hard not to wish that Tinker Tailor hadn't done more to take us into this world (a la Lives of Others), to make us understand the battles that had been fought that underpinned the battles which these men continued to fight through the Cold War, battles of both a political but also a personal nature.

let the right one in (d. tomas alfredson; w.john lindqvist)

Swedish vampire flick. Electric cinema. Not obvious doe-eyed territory but word of mouth does its bit, and consequently I find myself sitting in the most comfortable cinema seat I've ever been in at 11 o'clock on a Monday morning, feet up on the leather foot-rest (sic) waiting for the Smiths to kick in.

Context. Leather foot-rests because that's what you get if you go to the Electric and don't sit in the first three rows. Where you still get the comfortable chair. There was only five people in the cinema, so although I got the discount seat, I craftily re-located. The only thing is you wouldn't want to watch anything too demanding, because these are siesta-seats, ideal for snoozing. If the question were to arise, 'Can a cinema seat be too comfortable?', you would have to cite the Electric. A far cry from the last time I went there, twenty five years ago, to watch a Bergman double bill. Before I knew anything at all. The Smiths, because one of the few things I'd gleaned about the film was that the title is apparently a line from a Smiths song, though I'm not sure which, and was hoping to be enlightened.

I wasn't. The film is set sometime towards the end of the Brezhnev years. Not something I would have guessed had his name not been mentioned in a news report. The chunky Swedish Ikea fashions have come round again, so the Brezhnev namecheck came as something of a surprise, and also seemed to show that you can do a period piece set in recent decades without wigs or silly costumes or laboured historical references. Perhaps if I was Swedish I'd have been more clued in to the cultural nuances, but on another level what the film succeeds in doing is taking you away from your previous assumptions about Sweden in the 80s or, more importantly, what a vampire flick should be like. Replacing these assumptions with a beautifully shot world all of its own.

Hoyte Van Hoytem is the cinematographer, and the film is something of a personal triumph for him (or her?), with the director making the most of his (or her) talents. Much of the film, this being a vampire movie, is set after the sun has set, and the lighting is beautifully composed, capturing the stillness of a snowbound Swedish night. The editing is also measured, the shots allowed to linger for just long enough to resonate, to make the viewer look rather than merely see. Added to this, the performances of the two child stars are beguiling, their relationship completely believable. The film makes a virtue of its lack of showiness: we know that Eli can fly, but we never see her doing so; we know Oskar wants to stab someone, but he never does. Whilst there is blood-letting, this too is done with restraint, with the director sensitive to the fact that the sight of a 12 year old girl's mouth swathed in blood is probably more disconcerting than a vampire sucking blood from an unfortunate Swede's neck.

The word of mouth was right. Let The Right One In is an effective, tender film, made with a great deal of skill. Watching the film, and in spite of the slightly tortuous plotting in the final third, you always feel as though you're in the hands of film makers who know what they're up to, who don't try and overwhelm you with their genius, preferring to let their genius creep up on you and suck your blood when you're least expecting it. I'm not sure if Bergman would have been proud of it, but if every film I ever see at the Electric is Swedish and lives up to the tradition which has been set I'll be back there, in the cheap seats again.