Often compared, quite favorably, to Homeland, this well-regarded mini-series, created by Éric Rochant for Canal+, follows the activities of the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécuritéextérieure), the French equivalent of Britain’s MI6 or the CIA, particularly its undercover division.
Praised for its realistic tone and intricate construction, it has focused since its inception in 2015 primarily on Guillaume Debailly, codename Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz), although a constellation of other characters have swirled around him, some close associates and others only tangentially related to him. As this fifth season begins, he is presumed to have been killed by separatists in Eastern Ukraine, but a newspaper reports that he was actually terminated by the CIA with the connivance of the DGSE, sending shockwaves through the intelligence community.
Of course, the rumors are entirely mistaken, and Malotru is still alive in the hands of Mikhail Karlov, a director of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. All this, it turns out, is part of a scheme hatched by Jean-Jacques Angel (Mathieu Amalric), the current head of the DGSE, to repay the Russians for what he suffered at their hands years before. (The closeness of the Russian director’s name to a character in John le Carré’s Smiley books is surely intended as a clue to Angel’s ultimate aim.)
While Malotru’s fate is at the center of the labyrinthine storyline, however, the season makes room for subplots involving other agency members (and ex-members) serving in such varied locales as Egypt and Cambodia as well as Russia and entities like ISIS. It concludes with what appears a decisive end to the five-year arc of the series and the characters who populated it; if a sixth season occurs, it will necessarily require a different cast and a narrative that starts from scratch.
That ending, moreover, marks a stylistic shift for The Bureau as well, since Rochant turned over artistic control of the final two of the ten episodes to writer-director Jacques Audiard, whose dreamlike approach brings the series to a melancholy, almost surrealistic close at odds with Rochant’s hyper-realism, and some longtime fans will undoubtedly find the tonal change disconcerting.
The number of characters and the complexity of the overall narrative pretty much ensure that anyone coming to the series for the first time with this fifth season would be lost; new viewers are advised to go back to the beginning and savor how Rochant and his collaborators built the world of the DGSE and its many players skillfully over time. Taken together, the five-season span provides a ride as engrossing as any that le Carré contrived, but with a Gallic accent.
As usual, the subtitling here is selective: while the numerous non-English segments have English captions, those spoken in English do not. No extras, but highly recommended.