What was “Mobius” about? Even raft of film reviews couldn’t say
I mean, I saw the film, and I read the reviews – the first five or six that popped up on Google – and I still don’t exactly get it.
He, played by Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin, is a one-time ranking Russian criminal underworld member with requisite tattoo turned ranking undercover Russian intelligence officer sent to Monaco, the international playground of the world’s very rich, for some spying.
She, played by Cecile de France (appropriately), is a brilliant Franco-American international banker so Machiavellian, she is credited with single-handedly bringing down Lehman Bros., luring them into her web of speculative trading, but is then scapegoated for causing the financial crisis in general and barred from working in the U.S. However, she is recruited by the CIA and sent to Monaco – for some spying.
The target of both is a crooked Russian oligarch, young, hunch-shouldered and sleazy, but ruthless in his pursuit of illegal multi-billion-dollar gains. The son of a bitch – he’s going down!
Naturally, she, Alice Redmond in the film, is destined to meet he, whose very name in Russian is Love itself – Liubov (that’s Gregory Liubov).
She, a cool-as-crystal blonde; he, dark, handsome (not better looking than Manny Face), like smoldering coal in need of a shave – the chemistry is perfect – they meet, go to bed, he tempers her like steel, molding her into the embrace of his strong arms.
For you see, beneath that calculating coldness and terrifying intelligence is a real woman, with feelings, and Liubov stirs those feelings. Lying on his back, with apparently little more than a steady stare of his dark glistening eyes into her transfiguring face, he gives her the orgasms of a lifetime. She falls desperately and irretrievably in love. She gets a tattoo that is partially like his.
He loves her too, which is why he goes way out of his way to protect her and their trysts from the spying eyes of his superiors – and anyone else who may be up and about, spying. He’s told her he’s in the publishing biz and she’s believed him.
But the jig is up when a Russian FSB chick, undercover as a Monaco financial police officer, meets Alice Redmond in a high-end sauna – where she’d usually get from Alice compromising details on the Russian oligarch’s holdings and the portfolio structure of the ingeniously opaque investments Alice is manipulating his assets through – and notes Alice’s new tattoo, which is in part identical to Liubov’s. Alice, of course, cannot suspect that she is suspected, since as far as she’s concerned, Liubov is a former Russian Mafioso who is now clean and in the literary editing business, and not another spy sent by the other side to work the same case.
On this score, methinks she could have troubled her superior noggin for a nonce.
Alice is working for the CIA. She is also, knowingly or not, working for the FSB. Liubov is working for the FSB. Therefore, what difference does it make to the FSB if he lays her, and they know he’s laying her, as long as he maintains his cover and it makes doing his job easier? This is what Manny Face can’t get his head around. For that matter, what difference would it have made if he had told her he was a Russian spy, and like her was working to get the same goon – who, incidentally, escapes to England.
Then, in a restaurant, Russian men tell Liubov he’s a Mobius.
A Mobius, if you look the thing up, is like when you take a strip of paper and bring the two ends together in a circle, except you twist one of the ends 180 degrees, so that if you start tracing your finger along one of the strip’s two surfaces, you will end up on the other surface – on the inside if your start outside, and vice versa.
Showing him such a strip, the men indicate they’ve caught Liubov out playing both sides, although it’s not clear to Manny Face whether Liubov knew he was playing both sides, or whether he was played by one or both of the sides, somewhat like Alice.
At another table at the same restaurant, looking at Liubov, Alice, who has also turned out to be a Mobius, realizes his lie to her and therefore his betrayal. Needless to say, she’s very upset. Tears run down her cheeks as she fixes her eyes on him, passing by.
But Liubov will be okay. He just has to lie low for a while until the affair blows over, after which he’ll be handsomely rewarded and cared for by the Russian state.
Things for Alice, on the other hand, don’t go so good. For she’s poisoned (for her involvement, for her affair with Liubov, for everything she knows), although it’s not clear by whom – the FSB or the no-goodniks behind the now exiled Russian tycoon. Her life is saved, but the poisoning has possibly wiped everything that is essential about Alice away.
But Liubov visits her in the hospital, and when he puts his arms around her, she recognizes his embrace, love conquers all, and she just might make it all the way.
Bravo to the French and their untiring big-empire Russophilism. Russia is not ungrateful. After all, it gave Gerard Depardieu that apartment.
This movie’s okay, but nothing to write a review about, as it’s nowhere near in suspense and excitement to the action-packed spy thrillers we’re used to. Manny Face isn’t for blockbusters, but if you’re on a big budget, you’ve got to deliver, baby.
Know what I mean?
Manny Face, May 13, 2013