The spies are at the same time writers of everyday life and artists of their own creation.
They concoct, invent, recreate, lie, live the truth of their own trollas and finally achieve their goals through a continuous representation that occupies them 24 hours a day.
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Spies in Huelva: the man who never existed
For this reason, in the magnificent
Three Days of the Condor
, the CIA had an entire department of librarians at the service of the institution, experts in history who tried to foresee future reality through the analysis of fictions from the present and the past.
And that is why, in the midst of World War II, in 1943, a group of British Army analysts, experts in deception operations, came up with the most exciting of fictional stories, in order to try to convince the Nazis of that the allies were going to invade Greece instead of Sicily.
An almost unlikely war strategy, which they called Operation Minced Meat, which the cinema already dealt with in the classic
The Man Who Never Was,
directed by Ronald Neame in 1956, based on a book published by one of the perpetrators of the great hoax, Ewen Montagu, and now joined
by The Weapon of Deception,
directed by John Madden, and based on a relatively recent book, published in 2010 by Ben Macintyre, historian and journalist for
The Times
, which offers new details that Montagu could not determine at the time due to the pact of certain silence he had with the secret services.
With a very uneven career, Madden, director of
Shakespeare in Love
, never stood out for his creative details and here he once again demonstrates that, at most, he can be a good story illustrator if the script he starts from is solid and attractive.
That was the case of the surprising winner of the Oscar for best film about the loves of the playwright;
The
Debt
(2010), also in the spy subgenre;
and, in a certain sense, that of
El Arma del Deceit,
in which, yes, the real event and what is being told always remains at a much higher level than the way in which it is being told.
Along with the espionage, the romantic melodrama is very present in a production with a somewhat old-fashioned aura, but with that eternal capacity of British cinema to stamp great historical episodes on the screen.
Hence, together with the presence of a handful of actors and actresses from the series, the film has a visual and production aspect similar to any of the episodes of
The Crown
;
here, without the queen, although with Winston Churchill, who this time plays the great theater actor Simon Russell Beale.
Academic and relatively vigorous, but never as exciting as the great story it describes inside,
El Arma del Deceit
has for the Spanish viewer the added incentive of the fundamental role of our country in perhaps the best episode in the history of disinformation, since The coast of Huelva was chosen to leave the false corpse with the false papers that were supposed to deceive the Germans.
The neutrality of Spain, its fascist network and good relations with the Nazis offered the perfect conditions for a diverse group of Spaniards to collaborate in the mess without knowing it, which leads to the interpretive presence of, among others, Pedro Casablanc and Javier Godino .
The patience, thoroughness and artistry once displayed by the perpetrators of World War II's most famous hoax remain superior to any film.
His unusual inventiveness and his unsurpassed representation are unparalleled.
The artists, at least for this time, were them, because even Churchill's last sentence seems insurmountable: "They have swallowed all the minced meat."
The weapon of deception
Direction:
John Madden.
Cast:
Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly MacDonald, Penelope Wilton.
Genre:
espionage.
United Kingdom, 2021.
Duration:
128 minutes.
Premiere: May 20.
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