My first memory of Brit Asian actress Archie Panjabi is of her in East in East and pigtails, kicking a soccer ball around the back yard. I next saw her burnishing her Asian cred as the bride in Bend It Like Beckham. So it was a pleasant surprise when she popped up in The Constant Gardener, a John Le Carré thriller adapted for screen by the director of the wonderfully fluid City of God.

Like Sarita Choudhury in A Perfect Murder, Panjabi plays yet another desi Tonto. Her character Gita, a member of the British High Commission in Kenya, is sidekick and confidante to Tessa Quayle, played by lovely, googly-eyed Rachel Weisz in a mummy suit. Ralph Fiennes’s self-effacing diplomat spends the movie decoding his wife Tessa’s secret life and eventual assassination. His British accent turns ‘Gita’ into the German ‘Gitte’; in the screen credits it’s massacred again as ‘Ghita,’ acolyte of ghee. Aside from the appellation snafu, Panjabi gets to turn up in a sari and plays the vulnerable diplomat quite serviceably.

The movie itself suffers in comparison with City of God. It’s just as long (around 2:10) but not nearly as light on its feet: blame the patient English for that. It’s a Big Pharma conspiracy theory intercut with an ad for Africa aid. Several passages are filmed in grainy Primer green with buzzing fluorescent lights and very un-starlike blood and grime. Other passages are stylistically familiar, filmed in extreme close-up with a shaky, handheld camera, the colors supersaturated and grainy. Fernando Meirelles turns a lake bed into red and blue abstract art. The couple-play is as natural as can be expected when the stiff English mate in a Calvin Klein linen closet; unlike Meirelles’ earlier film, by the end the protagonists have been thoroughly sainted.

Also unlike the kinetic CoG, this one takes the notion that movies should start with a bang and turns it on its head. The rest of the film keeps up that languid pace, so all the ad blurbs claiming it to be a thriller are overblown, to put it kindly. On one level, the über-boring title is truth in advertising; slack pacing is the enemy at these gates. On another, this is a visually inventive and deeply serious movie about the cat’s cradle between Western governments, African corruption and MNCs, with ordinary Africans caught in the middle — not to mention a posthumous, detective-story romance.

Ithought of the movie when I heard how a femme fatale penetrated the British High Commission in Islamabad:

Britain has removed its defence attaché in Pakistan… Red-faced and tight-lipped British officials said they were not ready to provide any details… Durcan had been recalled because he had been “tricked into a close friendship by the attractive woman”… But it described the woman as a “defence academic” who was “also believed to be an undercover agent for rogue elements within Pakistan’s intelligence services”. [Link]

How Fat Bastard was burned by his honeytrap:

The married Durcan… was nicknamed “the tartan barrel” by officers under his command in Scotland because of his girth…

“Careful and thorough investigation and a number of background interviews with military diplomats close to Brigadier Durcan revealed that a research fellow from Institute of Strategic Studies is the lady behind the whole affair… Holding dual nationality, one Pakistani and other British… She came under suspicion by MI6 undercovers in Islamabad mission when she sought interviews with defence officials of the High Commission to be used in her research papers.

“According to sources, she would ask some very pointed and pertinent questions. But when she went back she never used these interviews and wrote nothing on these issues… The girl and the Brigadier were monitored. Phones were bugged. Even the room and the house of the British Military Attache were bugged.

“Some sources claimed that some filming was also done to prepare incriminating evidence. Both were also spotted intimately together at some social functions. Sources claimed that the Brigadier also travelled to England many times to spend time with her and his engagements in England were also watched and closely monitored.

“A team arrived from London in early January this year after Christmas holidays and the Brigadier was confronted for the first time about the status of his relations with the young lady. He was asked to report back to London where, according to sources, he appeared before a three-member military tribunal along with the internal inquiry report, and evidence based on phonic conversations and perhaps with some pictures”. [Link]

“The lady was a threat because of her ability to eavesdrop and comprehend the import of ‘shop talk’ among military attaches at embassy functions and social gatherings. These are the lifeblood of the Western scene in Pakistan, where opportunities for entertainment are relatively few and far between… Islamabad can be a lonely, if busy, posting.” [Link]

The research institute disclaimed responsibility:

Dr Mazari said the woman had not worked at the ISS for “many years”, as the newspaper said, but for only two years, and she did not have dual nationality. “She does not work in any of the defence-related areas identified by the correspondent – conflict resolution, non-proliferation and the EU. Rather, her area of expertise was the UN and peacekeeping and she has three publications on these issues – not many research papers, as claimed by the correspondent.”

She said the woman had travelled to England only once in the past 15 years – earlier this year to attend a peacekeeping conference on her way to the US – and not frequently as claimed by reporter. [Link]

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p>But the alleged ISI agent has nothing on Cold War possible triple-agent Christine Keeler:

In 1963, the entire Conservative administration of Harold Macmillan had its reputation besmirched by the relationship secretary of state for war John Profumo had with model and showgirl Christine Keeler. Profumo did not know she was also sleeping with Russian naval attache Yevgeny Ivanov. It was at the height of the Cold War. Apparently, she also had an affair with a Pakistani leader. [Link]

There’s a shortage of faces to launch a thousand ships in this world. The Brits, Russians and Pakistanis: if only she’d managed to work Israel or China into her busy schedule, she could’ve been the century’s new Archduke Ferdinand.

My City of God musings are here.