In
Russia, today’s captain of industry is tomorrow’s rogue oligarch. Even sponsoring the next head of the FSB is
not enough to protect one tycoon.
Instead, it makes him a liability.
An agent specializing in sensitive assignments will target the shadowy money
man through an attractive employee, leading to all sorts of complications in
Eric Rochant’s Möbius (trailer here), which screens at
this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Gregory
Lioubov commands an FSB team pretending to be a Monaco police task force,
attempting to turn Alice Redmund, a brilliant trader for with a scandalous
past. Redmund works for Ivan Rostovski’s
multi-national firm, but she also secretly reports to an American handler. Realizing the Russians are putting a play on
Rostovski, the CIA instructs Redmund to play along with the task force she
still assumes are local cops.
When
Lioubov accidentally picks up Redmund to protect his cover[s], it compromises
them both. Suddenly, Redmund is hiding
their burgeoning affair from the jealous Rostovski while Moïse, as Lioubov
calls himself, scrambles to keep his incompetent subordinates in the dark. Then things really get tricky.
Möbius is pretty steamy
stuff by espionage movie standards. These
spies definitely come in out of the cold.
As Lioubov (or whoever) and Redmund, co-leads Jean Dujardin and Cécile
de France have real chemistry and are not afraid to go all in. However, the rest of the cloak-and-daggering
is not bad either. While there seems to
be a bit of an anti-American bias, at least it is rather muddled. The FSB on the other hand is clearly
portrayed as a nest of vipers indistinguishable from its previous incarnation
as the dreaded KGB.
In
a change-up from his Oscar winning turn in The Artist, Dujardin brings a dark, brooding physicality to Lioubov. De France is a respectable femme
fatale-anti-heroine, but Tim Roth nearly steals the show as the erratic British
educated Rostovski.
