The hunt for international terrorists heats up on Liaison [Apple TV+ recap]

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Vincent Cassel in ★★★★☆
An espionage thriller starring Vincent Cassel? Yes, please.
Photo: Apple TV+

TV+ ReviewIn the explosive second episode of Apple TV+ thriller Liaison, Richard, Albert and Alison find common ground over a crash, while Gabriel flits around London trying to recapture the missing Syrian hacker he lost.

The French government is being kneecapped by secrets and hidden ambitions, while the British haven’t a clue what’s happening or why. The gripping Stephen Hopkins-directed series continues to make for a pleasant (if upsetting) watch.

Liaison recap: ‘Chaos’

Season 1, episode 2: In this week’s episode, entitled “Chaos,” our hero, French expatriate and British government security official Alison (played by Eva Green) thinks she’s seen a ghost. Just as she’s negotiating with her boyfriend, Albert (Daniel Francis), about getting a high-profile human rights case courtesy of her boss, cabinet minister Richard Banks (Peter Mullan), who shows up at her front door to scare her but old flame, the French spy Gabriel Dalage (Vincent Cassel). We met Gabriel last week as he was sent by his government on a covert mission to take two hackers into custody

Gabriel is in town for the guy Albert’s defending, Walid (Marco Horanieh), a defecting Syrian hacker. If you’ll recall, Walid is one of two hackers who fled Syria with secret information, much to the Syrian government’s chagrin. His cousin Samir (Aziz Dyab) got away when Walid was stabbed by Gabriel in an elevator during an attempted apprehension. Gabriel has intelligence about a potential threat to the governments of Europe. The French want Walid — hence Gabriel’s presence in London, which has not gone unnoticed.

Indeed, the French president (Thierry Frémont) is getting a briefing from his boss’ boss. The minister’s aide Sophie Saint-Roch (Irène Jacob) wants to know how and why Gabriel’s showing up on CCTV footage in London, and who hired him. Her rival in the cabinet, a minister named Didier (Stanislas Merhar), the man who kicked off this operation to retrieve the hackers, admits candidly enough that Gabriel is kept on retainer by former spy Dumas (Gérard Lanvin), who now runs a private security firm.

What’s the big deal? Sophie wants to work with the British, but Didier talks around her. And the president agrees that France should keep aiming for the W on this. It would look better on the world stage, never mind what Didier actually wants the hacker for. Sophie is suspicious.

What, exactly, is Walid up to?

Gabriel recognizes that, despite the official unofficial support of his government, he’s going to need more help retrieving his package. He puts a flier on Alison’s car directing her to an AA meeting, where he’s waiting for her. She doesn’t buy his explanation that Walid wants to go back to France, though. Why the violent altercation when he showed up?

Albert is wondering the same thing, having only been given the above-board version of Walid’s arrest and attack. So the police finally let him in on what they think they know — but they don’t know much. They think Walid’s been recruited by ISIS. If so, why the star on his coat? (It’s a symbol of the Druze, an ethnic minority in Syria whose beliefs are anything but hardcore.) Alison takes Gabriel to the hospital, but won’t be seen with him inside. So Gabriel leaves after he loads his pistol and gets out of her car.

Just as well. Right then, something bad happens to Albert’s daughter Kim (Bukky Bakray). She’s on a train with some school friends when it crashes, thanks to a malfunctioning computer system (the very thing Walid and Samir are here to warn people about). Alison gets to the scene of the crash before they load Kim into the ambulance. She can see Kim’s alive, which is a little consolation to Albert, but not much.

Meanwhile, Gabriel uses the confusion of the crash to slip into the hospital to get Walid’s information. There’s a great moment when Gabriel sneaks into Walid’s room. Alison catches him, and they embrace, seemingly ready to resume their affair right then and there. But Walid flatlines, and doctors rush in to save him.

Samir is the key

Unfortunately, getting Walid’s fingerprints isn’t enough to open the thumb drive he smuggled out of Syria. And that means Gabriel needs Samir to give him the password. The trouble is, Samir is hundreds of miles away in a Syrian tent city near Dunkirk. Gabriel can try to get his whereabouts from Alison, but they’ll have to get very close again to do so.

If they couldn’t handle an hour together without almost getting back to business, their continued involvement spells trouble for Alison’s allegiances. Of course, she might not have a choice in the matter. The British police have picked up Gabriel’s trail via CCTV, and come close to apprehending him. He asks Alison for future help. But he knows it might be time to leave London, even if he doesn’t know where Samir is, so he leaves and takes Alison’s cellphone with him.

Banks wants England to rejoin a European council on cybersecurity. He tasks Alison with reigniting the talks, giving her the name of a Belgian cabinet member to work with. Her name is Sabine Louseau (Laëtitia Eïdo), and she’s in a years-long affair with the very married Didier. He goes to her to blackmail her (nicely) into ensuring that the Europeans don’t let England sign the deal right away.

Didier clearly has something cooking there, but he won’t say what. All we know is one of his puppet masters, Bob Foret (Eriq Ebouaney), stopped by Didier’s place to dress him down about the possibility of the English scooping their plan, whatever it is, by getting protection from the European Union. Curious.

Liaison is a no-nonsense international espionage thriller done right

Irène Jacob in "Liaison," now streaming on Apple TV+.
Irène Jacob plays Sophie Saint-Roch, a French aide looking for answers amid an international terrorism plot.
Photo: Apple TV+

A lot of other Liaison reviewers complained last week that the show isn’t terribly innovative TV. That’s certainly true. The creative team wouldn’t have leaned on executive producer Stephen Hopkins to direct if they were looking to reinvent the wheel.

As a series that explores one of the few remaining what-ifs about 21st-century geopolitics on the European stage, written and co-created by Virginie Brac (Cheyenne & Lola and Insoupçonnable), I think it’s a perfectly fun and basically exacting alternate-present sort of a thing. I don’t mind that I’ve seen these things before, because they’re done efficiently and with actors I like.

A weekly series with Eva Green and Vincent Cassel is already a great prospect (and we must take a second to recognize that they’re asking her to be her most depressed angel of death type, a personality she excels at depicting). But we also get Eriq Ebouaney showing up as a heavy, and Irène Jacob as a bullish functionary who can see right through the weaselly Stanislas Merhar, all while Peter Mullan holds it down as a loose-cannon cabinet minister.

That’s a lot of acting firepower. A worse show would be watchable with all Liaison has going for it. And a perfectly adequate one like this becomes very good TV.

★★★★☆

Watch Liaison on Apple TV+

New episodes of Liaison appear on Apple TV+ each Friday.

Rated: TV-MA

Watch on: Apple TV+

Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.

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