Why is Le Bureau so much better than The Agency?

Also, sorry for the long absence...I'm still alive and well and living in Paris, promise.

Virginia Colwell, A DIPTYCH, A CHRONICLE. Digital video with English audio and Spanish subtitles. 2016

How to watch:

Le bureau des légendes: If you’re in the US, the first season is streaming on Amazon Prime. For the other four seasons, it’s tricky—you’ll either have to buy the seasons individually on Amazon or Apple TV, or buy the DVD. If you’re in France (good for you), you can stream the entire show on Canal+.

The Agency: The first season was just released, and is streaming on Paramount+.

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Le Bureau des légendes is a French spy thriller that ran on Canal for five seasons, from 2015-2020. I might as well get my personal feelings out of the way: It's one of my favorite television series ever, a funny and smart workplace drama, in the vein of the The West Wing, mixed with the double-agent intrigue of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. At its heart, though, Le Bureau is a love story between Paul Lefebvre, codename Malotru (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Nadia El-Mansour (Zineb Triki), who meet in Damascus, where Paul has been an undercover agent for the past six years. Together, the two actors, though rarely together onscreen, forge the long arc that holds the story together across five seasons and as many continents.

The operational targets of Le Bureau, which runs undercover agents abroad on behalf of the DGSE¹, are mostly Obama-era—the rise of ISIS, the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the development of sophisticated election interference in Russia—but these are just the show's outward form, the standard thriller part: interrogations, kidnappings, drones, bombs, and so forth. The drama, however, is generated by the peculiar brand of office politics practiced by a bunch of extremely well-trained liars who also happen to be colleagues, lovers, and friends. The central lie, which everyone claims not to believe, but secretly does, is this: You can be a spy, and still have a normal life. The central truth, which is rarely acknowledged, is that spies destroy and poison everyone they touch, and so do spy agencies. If your goal is to threaten the life, happiness, and overall wellbeing of yourself, your family, your friends, your colleagues, and everyone you've ever loved, then the best thing you can possibly do is become a spy.²

Again and again, we see normal people corrupted, maimed, tortured, and killed at the altar of that vengeful and supposedly omniscient God, 'intelligence'. In this way, Paul and Nadia neatly encapsulate the two types of people who are pulled into the game: Those, like Paul, who become agents by choice, and those, like Nadia, who are recruited, generally under false pretenses, because they have access to valuable information. Le bureau works for a lot of reasons—great writing, complex, well-developed characters, an expert sense of pacing, a good sense of humor, a general lack of self-seriousness—but above all because it dramatizes with extraordinary precision the twin movements of one soul from a state of unexamined innocence to one of terrible understanding, and the movement of another from terrible understanding to a forceful and self-negating love. Paul and Nadia really do love one another, with a natural and overwhelming passion; onscreen, you can see it written into every cell. There's never a moment when you don't believe that these two people were meant for one another—recruited, even—and that, for this woman, Paul would commit the one unpardonable sin for a spy, which is to tell the truth to the other side.

These two people are clearly into one another…

The Agency is an American remake of the Le Bureau, with Michael Fassbender and Jodie Turner-Smith reprising the roles of the undercover spy and the forbidden love interest. As Paul Lewis and Dr. Samia Zahir, an Ethiopian sociologist, Fassbender and Turner-Smith do not, unfortunately, seem to exist in the same dramatic space, which I think is mostly Fassbender's fault, because he's a very bad liar. (Though it might be more accurate to say that he has no talent for playing a good one.) Martian, his codename, is apt—he does indeed seem like he's from another planet—and while The Agency doesn't work for a lot of reasons, in large part it's because Fassbender's Paul is clearly neither trustworthy nor capable of inspiring trust in others.

In The Agency, the characters, storylines, and even much of the dialogue are copied directly from Le Bureau, and yet where the Le Bureau is light, funny, and warm-hearted, The Agency is dull, dry, and sententious, from the wooden writing all the way to the 50 Shades of Beige production design. (Is Samia really the only person in London who wears bright colors?) I found it extraordinary that a remake so outwardly faithful could fail so utterly to understand the appeal and inner workings of the original. Even more extraordinary is that The Agency seems aware of its faults, without being capable of mitigating them. The Agency is a failure of human intelligence—it can't decide whether to impersonate someone else, or to forge its own legend.

These two people may not have met before rehearsing this scene…

Compare the opening scenes. Le Bureau begins with two shots of a computer screen shot in extreme closeup. We see a pair of lips. A female voice asks a question. So, how did it go? The lips respond: It went well.³ We see a pair of eyes, searching for the meaning of this response. She takes a stab: So you don't want to talk about it? The lips respond: Si, je peux en parler, which is very flat, neutral.⁴ Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t.

Then we cut to a highrise apartment building in Damascus. Nadia enters a hotel room wearing a lovely patterned headscarf and oversized glasses that conceal her face—Paul may be the spy, but Nadia, who is cheating on her husband, is the one in disguise. Nadia passes very close to Paul, takes off her sunglasses and headscarf, and they kiss. It's long, intense, desperate, helpless, the one true thing we've seen thus far.

The Agency, on the other hand, begins with a long, static shot of Fassbender just off a military plane, carrying a large black canvas bag and walking slowly toward the camera, alone. There is no voiceover. When we first see Paul and Samia together, we're in a wide shot with the two actors at opposite ends of Paul's apartment in Addis. No kiss. How did it go? the female voice asks. Fassbender screws up his eyes up to the ceiling, like a little kid who's just been caught breaking his sister’s new toy. How did it go? he repeats, with unconvincing brio. Take a wild guess. In the apartment with Sami, he tells her that he's leaving (true), and then, just before admitting that he's received a job offer in Jordan (lie), he literally puts his hand to his neck.⁵ It's crazy—this guy is supposed to a highly gifted liar! The best of the best! It really makes you wonder whether Fassbender has no talent for playing a good liar, or a great talent for playing a bad one.⁶

Both scenes work by juxtaposing the lies that Paul tells his handler in the interview with the truth of what happened in the scene, but only Le Bureau shows two human beings, navigating an intensely dramatic moment with a mix of tenderness, play, sadness, and resignation. I believed in one, and not the other.

Everything in The Agency is sprawling and also isolating. London is grey and immense, while the CIA office is a massive, marbled, open plan monster, affectionately known as the 'Chicken Coop'. Just like Martian, the tell is in the name: The Agency is about individuals losing their identity within an unforgiving and impersonal structure, while Le Bureau is smaller, an intimate story of betrayal, and betrayal as a form of intimacy—maybe even the most intimate. No one in The Agency ever really believes that they're a family: This is humanity in the American spirit, a collection of atomized individuals who will try, but always fail, to connect with one another. The philosophical argument of Le Bureau, on the other hand, is that we can connect, and do, but that true connection leaves us terribly vulnerable. In pursuit of our own ends, we will betray the ones we love the most, and be betrayed in turn. We want to be loved, but in pursuit of being loved by everyone, we end up alone, loved by no one.

The tragedy of Le Bureau is that Paul forces himself to make a choice between his love and his loyalty—he believes that he can lie to everyone, working each side without the other finding out. He calls this mistake la loi de la toute-puissane (literally "the law of the all-powerful") which has been so essential to his survival in the field. Now that he’s home, he can't bring himself to transform j'en suis capable ("I can do it") to on en est capable (“we can do it”), which would require telling the truth to Nadia, giving her the chance to take him as he is. (For a start, of course, his real name is not Paul Lefebvre.) Over five seasons, we watch as he endures almost every imaginable punishment for his continued adherence to la loi de la toute-puissance, though nothing is as devastating as the price paid by the people whose lives he manipulates, controls, exploits, and destroys along the way, including, finally, the person he loves most.

Whenever I watch a spy show, I find myself wondering: Would I be good at this? Probably everyone does. I know it's delusional, but I think I would have been a very gifted spy—fiction writers are born liars, which is one of the reasons I find the debate over whether we should still engage with the work of writers who have done bad things so perplexing. In this business, no one is clean. A good writer will betray anyone to get the story they're after.

Yet while great writers have powers of surveillance that would shame even the CIA, I think they also suffer from the same delusion as great spies. When writing a book, I find myself continually in thrall to la loi de la toute-puissance, which tells me that only I am capable of solving the problems in front of me, only I am capable of telling this story and shaping this book into the perfect work of art I am positively certain it can be. There is a truth to this, and also a severe limitation. The very thing that gets the draft finished is what makes it so difficult to share—even as we try to connect, there is a suspicion that no one can ever understand, that we are alone and our work is incomprehensible, useless intelligence.

What makes Le Bureau such a great show is that it demonstrates the collective nature of intelligence gathering. We don't give intelligence, or offer it—we share it. It opens us up to betrayal, but it's also the best means we have to understand the world as it is.

1. The French CIA, basically. DGSE stands for Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure. The DGSI, on the other hand, is the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure, and is the French equivalent of the FBI, although, as the acronyms denote, the DGSE and DGSI work together much more closely than their American counterparts.

2. In this way, spy shows are a lot like shows about the Mafia, and I think the potential for betrayal built into each form explains the enduring appeal of both.

3. The French is formidable, which is a way of saying it went really well, although the tone in which this is delivered indicates a mix of irony and annoyance. Kassovitz is extremely good at delivering line readings that continually hold up a mirror to the viewer, and the other characters, the interpretation varying according the listener. The Agency, en revanche, forces the actors to deliver their lines with a clear emotional intent. You’ll also never catch Kassovitz screwing up his eyes in response to a question, not once, ever. I rewatched the first few episodes of the first season last night, and I noticed that every single character in Le bureau itself is extremely skilled at controlling the movement of their eyes when they’re being asked a question, even a difficult or personal one. They also tend not to respond immediately; they take their time before answering. Try these two techniques the next time you’re having a conversation—it requires a lot of discipline and conscious effort.

4. There's no perfect English equivalent, but it might be best rendered as a slightly contemptuous, sure, happy to, or, we can if you want.

5. For those of you who aren’t spooks for a living, putting a hand on a vulnerable place is a telltale sign that someone is lying.

6. I’ve been hard on Fassbender, but I don’t think he’s a bad actor. Rather, I think that great actors are like tuning forks—they vibrate at the frequency of what surrounds them. Fassbender’s insecurity reflects the essential insecurity of The Agency, which is aware that it can’t replicate the magic of Le bureau by simply copying it, but lacks the self-confidence to take a risk and make something new.