SNAPSHOT
A covert female operative infiltrates an anarchist faction that stages clandestine attacks on major corporations, and finds her mission compromised when she falls for the group’s charismatic leader in this tense and topical thriller from Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij — the creative duo behind the indie hit The Sound of My Voice. When a mysterious group begins turning unsafe products against the very CEOs who manufacture them, former FBI agent Sarah Moss (Marling) is hired by a powerful intelligence firm to expose the culprit. Before long, Sarah has integrated herself into The East, the group thought to be responsible the frightening attacks, and she begins to collect evidence against them. In time, however, Sarah finds her sympathies shifting to the very people she once set out to destroy, leading to an intense crisis of conscience that causes her to reassess her priorities as she works quietly to maintain her cover. (source: fandango.com)
If you are a person of firm and resolute beliefs, it is easy to believe in an untested, untried environment that your beliefs will stand firm comes what may.
We reason that because we believe these things so deeply that we will never waver or be persuaded to dilute them or abandon them altogether.
Sarah Moss is one such person, her implacable sense of conviction doubly reinforced by her role as a first an FBI agent, and then an operative for a private security firm, leading her to answer without hesitation her boss’s query about who should go undercover to infiltrate anarchist group The East with a firm “Me”.
She has no doubt she is the one for the job and tackles the assignment with the certainty and confidence only those utterly sure of their calling are capable of.
But life is rarely that simple is it?
The more she gets to know Benji, the charismatic leader of The East, the more her once-unshakable convictions start to look less and less like the sure things she once thought them to be.
And she’s faced with a choice – go with what she has always believed or allow herself to be swayed and moulded by Benji, a man as sure of what he believes as Sarah once was about her beliefs.
It’s a recipe for a powerful exploration of what is right and wrong, and whether even the most powerful beliefs can withstand the withering glare of a real life situation where you don’t have the luxury of lazily discussing these new conflicting ideas over a wine or two and must make reassess the basis of everything you know and believe very, very quickly.
If they strike the right balance between this existential struggle, and the action needed to propel the narrative along, this could one of those amazingly satisfying intellectually-solid thrillers that doesn’t require to check your brain in at the cinema door.
Or it could be as slow as wet weekend watching paint dry at the home of a noted French philosopher.
I am plumping that the former will be the case since Marling, who wrote the screenplay along with Zal Batmanglij, spent two months with an anarchist collective, living their life.
“We wanted to have some adventure, and we didn’t have any money. We learned to hop trains, we learned to sleep on rooftops, we learned to claim the space that feels so private. We joined this anarchist collective.” (USA Today)
The East opened in the USA on 31 May 2013 (after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2013) with no date yet set for Australia.