The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: On the “Mission: Impossible” Series
It’s 1996, Mission: Impossible has only been running for five minutes, and both Ion Caramitru and Marcel Iureș have already appeared on screen. Caramitru disappears right after the film’s opening scene. He plays some kind of Russian diplomat, the victim of a cruel setup by Tom Cruise’s team, which, using theatrical props (masks, fake walls, fake blood), tricks him into thinking he accidentally killed a prostitute. Caramitru cries and mumbles a few words in Russian. In the role of another Russian – one who gets hold of a floppy disk containing the list of all CIA agents in Eastern Europe – Iureș doesn’t utter a single word. He gracefully strolls through an embassy during a reception, tailed by Cruise’s crew. He manages to slip the floppy disk into a slot, steps out for a smoke in the bluish mist along the banks of the Vltava – and dies. The director is Brian De Palma, who is clearly flexing his stylistic muscles: he evokes Hitchcockian camera angles (like those used by Hitchcock in the reception scene from Notorious, where Ingrid Bergman hides the key stolen from the wine cellar in her palm), and the scene showing Cruise and Kristin Scott Thomas in a quiet exchange under the Prague night is styled in such a way (make-up, lighting, framing) that they could easily pass for the stars of a spy film Hitchcock might have made during World War II.
Andrei Gorzo
Critic de film (n. 1978). Publică din 1996. Este conferențiar universitar la UNATC, unde predă din 2004. Filmul lui preferat este Al treilea om/ The Third Man(1949). Scrie pe andreigorzoblog.wordpress.com.
