It's 1981 West Germany. Katrin delivers a bomb made by mysterious PLO bomb-maker Khalil killing an Israeli diplomat and his family. Charlie (Diane Keaton) is a naive pro-Palestinian actress. She is in Greece to do a job. When she spots Joseph, she believes him to be the masked Palestinian spokesman whose meeting she attended. He's actually an Israeli Mossad agent and they had taken the real masked man who is Khalil's brother Michel. The whole Greece trip is an Israeli trick. They reveal themselves to her and Martin Kurtz (Klaus Kinski) recruits her to be the brother's girlfriend to infiltrate Khalil's group.John le Carré's brand of espionage stories is often muddled. His world is a murky chaotic vision where questionable things are done which are often not the right course of action. Having said that, I don't understand why the Israelis would ever recruit Charlie. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't see Charlie helping the Israelis or ever believe them enough to really help them. They don't need the recruit to be Jewish, just not anti-Israeli. It might make sense if they pretend to be another terrorist group hoping to connect to Khalil. It's simply hard to understand the Israeli's course of action. Charlie's motivation for her journey is way too twisty. If one can ignore the questionable motivations, the plot is an intriguing twisty affair.

John Le Carre is the master of the spy novel. His stories, including this one, are more into the psychology of the characters than to violence and action. The film is a faithful rendition of the novel. Charlie, an actress, is "recruited" by the Israeli equivalent of our CIA, to cast a net to catch a terrorist. Her role will be to get close to the terrorist by claiming to be the girlfriend of the terrorist's brother. She is pro-Palestinian, so will she play along or not? Does she even want to get involved? It is not obvious as to why Charlie chooses as she does. I think that while she supports the Palestinian cause, she does not condone their bombings. Later, when she gets to know the terrorist responsible for the bombings, she is swayed back towards favoring the terrorists, but perhaps not all the way back. As typical with spy stories, characters are not always who they seem to be, but it isn't that difficult to follow. The only character whose true identity is in question is Charlie, and that is partly the role she is asked to play in the plot and partly her ambivalence and uncertainty as to what she should do.Diane Keaton is excellent as Charlie, and the rest of the cast are also terrific.

This movie is quite "ho-hum". Neither the difficulty of a bystander drawn into violent conflict in the Middle East (e.g., Eva Marie Sainte in Exodus), nor the violence, nor the espionage presents anything novel to the viewer. And there is one central problem: that outlined by Daniel Baker below in his review. The movie's central charge is that promiscuous Western women are fools and will, in exchange for a pleasant lunch, be willing accomplices to any violence anyone has in mind. Thus, the initial killings in the movie are caused by a Swedish girl. Why? She enjoyed sex with the terrorist who enjoined her to do so - after she met him at a club. The protagonist, Diane Keaton's character suddenly and dramatically changes the politics of a lifetime - due to a pleasant lunch and evening with an Israeli member of Mossad - even though she realizes that the Israeli deliberately caused her to believe he was another. Indeed, it's telling that Keaton's character came to adore one (hooded) man due to a short talk he gives, another because he gives her a pleasant lunch, and subverts the entire objective of her mission after she has slept with a third man. The statement, "OH! He's cute" presages a complete change of life for any woman. One is tempted to be kind and think that presenting ongoing Palestinian terrorism was novel when this was released in 1984, but we'd seen Exodus, Cast a Giant Shadow and others long before. (Both are more interesting movies). Moreover, it had been a dozen years since everyone had watched the Munich Olympics' kidnapping, it was 36 years after the Arabs in Palestine began their campaign of terror against the new state of Israel, and a century after the Arabs began to terrorize the Jews in Palestine. **** SPOILERS **** Another problem I had with this movie is the completely different reaction of Keaton's character to witnessing the killing of her friend/co-worker in Lebanon and her witness of the killing of the man she had worked throughout the movie to trap and kill. Why is she not unhinged by the former - but devastated by the death of her mission's enemy? One would think people who had spent long periods in terrorist camps would be inured to this sort of thing - and moviegoers have seen aplomb in the face of such violence in movies so frequently that her reaction at the end of the film seems strange.**** SPOILERS END **** This attempt to mix romance with a story about terrorism didn't work. There's too little real suspense - and since we hardly see any romance (merely a woman who makes a fool of herself with each good looking man) we have a very hard time sympathizing with her. Moreover, we hardly SEE any romance - simply a puppy-like enthusiasm about possible mates. In some respects, this movie should have been re-jiggered to be expressly about the Keaton character's sad loneliness, about her pathetic yearning to marry in incipient middle age. Then the movie would make more sense of why she falls for anyone (from anywhere) with a smile -- and she'll do anything (including participation in terrorist training camps) to win his favor - and when she likes another, she'll reverse course. The problem is that pity for the main character does not easily yield moment by moment to sympathy with a fool. It's not very good.

Oh, God, this movie was wretched. I saw it once when it first came out, 20 years ago, and still remember how awful it was.Don't worry about spoilers; I have no idea what the storyline was. All I remember is Diane Keaton just whining and wailing her way through the whole 5 hrs (oh, it was only an hour or two? coulda fooled me...). I don't think the writers, director or cast had any inkling of what they were doing or where they were going, and that's probably why Keaton's performance seemed so pointless.Who else was in it? Darned if I know.../r