Kleo

 Kleo on Netflix is an eight-part German spy v. spy series.  Like the old MAD magazine cartoons, the show features comically elaborate assassinations and there are disguises, weird lairs, and plenty of grotesque and sinister figures all plotting against one another.  The film is paranoid and conspiracy-oriented, suggesting that much of recent history has been the playground of international cabals of spooks and their fellow-travelers -- a main plot point links an assassination attempt on President Reagan to the East German STASI.  The program is effectively shot and fairly well-staged, although there are scenes that, sometimes, are difficult to follow -- a sequence in which the heroine cuts up a puffer-fish to extract its paralyzing venom didn't make sense to me except in retrospect.  In Germany, the show may have some vaguely allegorical aspects, elements of the plot that don't really register in the United States.  The only real reason to frequent this series is the amazing performance by Jella Haase as the titular spy.  Haase is one of those beautiful women who can look very different in every sequence in the film.  She's appealingly weird and awful, like a nightmare-figure from one of Grimm's more outre and macabre fairy tales.  Haase is as sardonic as a female James Bond, often taunting her victims before she murders them, but she's also strangely child-like, humming and whispering to herself, bopping villains on the nose before she offs them, and making strange autistic noises as she goes about her business.  After a couple programs, the viewer has the disquieting sense that she is completely and irretrievably mad.

Kleo is a spy, raised from early childhood to be a bland, efficient and supremely callous murderer.  In the opening scene, she blithely strolls through a tunnel under the Berlin Wall, struts around a West Berlin disco called Big Eden, and, then, offs a pussy-hound who may be a CIA operative.  Returning to East Berlin, she's inexplicably arrested by the STASI, sent to prison for a long term without any evidence of wrongdoing, and brutalized while confined (she's pregnant and has a bloody miscarriage).  When East Germany collapses, Kleo is released and immediately sets about hunting down and slaughtering the STASI operatives complicit in her confinement.  The film assumes the character of triple chase -- she has a Russian KGB spy chasing her, a CIA operative, and, also, a zealous, if inept, detective employed by the West Berlin police. (In fact, its a quadruple chase -- Uwe, a graduate of the same spy qua assassin school that Kleo attended, also pursues her.)  Borders and identities are fluid.  East Germany apparently still exists but in a phantom form and its secret police are busy trying to sell the State secrets to the West (or to the Russians).  Against, this background, Kleo appears as a true-believer, the last of the die-hard STASI assassins.  She calls herself a "scout", seemingly a euphemism for a specially trained murderer, and salutes old secret service colleagues (before killing them) with a cheery Immer Bereit, a sort of girl scout motto that means something like "Always Prepared!"  Kleo remains committed to Marxist-Leninist ideology and the people she kills, are guilty both of betraying her and betraying the East German regime that they once served -- its this aspect of the show that seems to have symbolic resonance.  

As is the case with most mini-series, Kleo is too long and, therefore, padded.  The show could have successfully completed its business in about five one-hour episodes -- but, then, who has ever heard of a five-part mini-series?  As the program progresses, it devolves away from the briskly jaunty and ironic mayhem in the first three episodes into something that is more serious, more bleak, and less interesting.  For instance, one episode is devoted to establishing Kleo's unhappy back-story, showing her separated from her mother (who is not a true believer in Sozialismus), and her training as a spy and assassin.  This is about the show's 5th program and introduces some new characters, including a Chilian operative named Jorge with whom Kleo had a school-girl romance and who has some significance in the last few episodes.  Otherwise, the surrealistically-staged flashback (Kleo is unconscious due to a bullet injury) adds nothing to the show and, in fact, weakens the program by being overly explicit.  Furthermore, introducing new characters this late in the game seems a bit desperate, a way of extending material that is about to become exhausted.  There's a heavily pregnant East German murderer, a bit like the very pregnant police commissioner in the Spanish show La Casa del Papel ("Money Heist") -- the villainous pregnant lady is now a trope in Netflix crime shows.  Kleo forms an alliance with Thilo, a Techno-Music fan who is squatting in a Kreuzberg flat near the Wall.  This kid has ridiculous blonde bangs over soulful eyes and he's an interesting character although he doesn't have much to do except to be threatened by the various thugs trying to execute Kleo.  (In a hommage to the Coen Brothers, Thilo, who believes himself an operative from the star Sirius, is whisked away by a cartoonish flying saucer in the last episode.)  About mid-way through the show, a plot develops around a suitcase with some sort of top-secret and highly sensitive contents -- this device plays out like a variant on the valise integral to Repo-Man and Kiss me Deadly.  There are a number of chases and shoot-outs involving the suitcase and, ultimately, it is recovered by Kleo, but, then, stolen and sent to the CIA by the assassin's hapless and inept sidekick, Sven, a cop working for the West German police.  (Sven's marriage collapses during his pursuit of Kleo and, at the very end, he becomes something like the heroine's boyfriend.)  

The film is shot in garish lollipop colors and features some attractive locations.  (It's as if the filmmakers wanted an excuse to work in Mallorca and Santiago de Chile.)  The last couple shows exploit some spectacular landscapes, apparently, foothills to the Andes near Santiago and, generally, the program is very pretty and features pretty people -- Ramona, the pregnant assassin is beautiful as is Sven, Kleo's assistant and, finally, boyfriend.  Logic and continuity is not Kleo's strongpoint -- for instance, a car chase up to the heights overlooking Santiago involves glorious vistas and dangerous-looking hairpin curves, but, then, ends on a flat pampas that doesn't seem even remotely connected to the preceding landscapes.  The longer the show runs, the more conventional it becomes and the more sentimental.  But, apparently, the show was sufficiently successful, at least, in Germany to warrant a second season because in the last five minutes, Kleo reverts to her savagely murderous origins, chases Sven out of her bed as a "class traitor" and one of the chief bad guys. a villain that we counted-out as dead, revives and seems to be ready to go on the offensive once more.   Presumably, this is all grist for the mill of a second season.