Many of John le Carré’s 90s novels grappled with the waning of the Cold War but The Tailor of Panama, published in 1996, was perhaps the first to truly inhabit a post-Cold War imaginary – and John Boorman’s 2001 adaptation, penned by Le Carré himself in collaboration with Andrew Davies, leans heavily into that project. Amongst film adaptations of Le Carré’s work, this is the first to truly acknowledge that the Cold War is over, and that the end of history prophesied by Francis Fukuyama has come to pass in the espionage community. Rather than greet this apparent victory of liberal democracy with relief or retirement, however, Le Carré’s post-Cold War spies simply detach their conspiratorial narratives from external reality altogether in favour of an endlessly self-referential play, not unlike the infinite possible permutations of the Hollywood espionage genre itself. This creates a very different tone from any previous Le Carré adaptation and turns The Tailor of Panama into both the most metafictive of his onscreen worlds and a hinge point in his cinematic career, which from this moment onwards presents stories, rather than secrets, as the core commodity of espionage, turning spycraft into an exercise in who can craft the most compelling narrative, rather than who has a genuine grasp of geopolitical realities.

All that unfolds following the ratification of the the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which handed control of the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians on December 31, 1999, and in doing so formed part of the epilogue to the Cold War and to the special relationship between Britain and America that had defined much of the twentieth century. For the Canal played a core military role in World War I and World War II, when its passage symbolised American naval dominance in both hemisphere, and took on additional symbolic freight in the Cold War, when it came to represent the conduit between East and West, between Soviet Russia and the Communist influence in the Caribbean and Latin American states. By the late 1990s, however, it had been largely shorn of these associations and instead become a symbol of a new globalised world order, a final threshold before the diffusion of the century of nation-states, and a perfect image for the “space of flow” that, in Manuel Castells’ terms, that come to define the next stage of late capitalism. It is within this precarious space between outdated geopolitical fantasy and new economic reality that The Tailor of Panama plays out.

At the heart of the narrative are two characters – Andy Osnard, an MI5 agent played by Pierce Brosnan who is relocated to Panama City after having an affair with the foreign minister’s mistress, and Harry Pendel, a (supposedly) displaced Savile Row tailor played by Geoffrey Rush, who has become a bedrock of the Panama expatriate community. Brosnan was universally recognisable as James Bond at this point in time, which makes The Tailor of Panama the perfect vehicle for him to act as a dialogue between Ian Fleming and John Le Carré’s competition traditions of British espionage fiction. To some extent these are diametrically opposed – whereas Bond represents supreme suaveness in the face of one-dimensionally evil villains, Le Carré’s protagonists, and George Smiley in particular, form a kind of lumpenbourgeoisie, driven by the bureaucratic bathos of compromised British institutions. Brosnan plays a kind of game with the audience here, encouraging us to misrecognise his character as a mere Bond cipher, and accentuating some of his most charismatic Bond traits, only to deconstruct the Bond archetype by revealing one of the most nihilistic characters he has ever committed to screen. Playfully subverting the common criticism that his version of Bond was all suavity and no sting, Andy Osnard is utterly decadent, infantile, abject and venal – in one scene he meets Pendel at a sex hotel, where he gives him his briefing as hardcore pornography plays on the television; in another, he pins Osnard’s wife Louisa, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, on a bed, and attempts to rape her, with only the most cursory of Bond-isms to justify this as a supposed act of charisma.

In other words, The Tailor of Panama speaks to the bathos of Bond at millennium, so it feels right that it was released on the cusp of Die Another Day, the film that did more than any other to delegitimise the franchise, necessitating the high concept approach of the Daniel Craig era as compensation. Perhaps the most distinctive departure from Bond, however, is Osnard’s utter lack of attachment to the British crown; finding himself put out to pasture, he does everything he can to concoct a narrative that will resituate his Panamanian backwater at the centre of the MI5 universe. It’s here that Rush’s character comes in – Harry Pendel, a tailor who is expert at stitching narratives together, and who Osnard bribes into becoming his “source,” in a postmodern riff on Graham Greene (and Carol Reed’s) Our Man in Havana. Since his business brings him into intimate contact with the different channels of Panamanian politics, Pendel is the perfect person to manufacture the crisis that Osnard needs, and he tailors his narrative to his audience, crafting a lurid cinematic fantasy, replete with rebels in the jungle, a leftist underground, and imminent global collapse, as a consolatory fantasy for officials back in London and Washington who are still inhabiting a Cold War mindscape. Transforming gossip into intelligence into crisis, in the form of a so-called “Silent Opposition,” Osnard qua Pendel effectively appeases the institutional memories of MI5 by selling them a Cold War film replete with even older and more comforting references, such as the code names “Buchan” and “Buchan 2.” At heart, Osnard wants to turn Panama into Casablanca – references to the film abound – but this is a simulacrum of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz’ film turned into a lurid theme park of history. Ironically, it’s only because the Panama Canal is now so secure that it can function as the canvas for this bureaucratic fantasy that the twentieth century is not coming to an end.

What ensues, then, as these confabulations escalate, is a vision of espionage at the end of history, as the Canal becomes a vacuum in which the old twentieth century geopolitical narratives no longer apply and informational agencies are forced to deal with peace by manufacturing crises to appease themselves, much as the handover of the Canal occurred smoothly despite the American hysteria and fearmongering that preceded it. Suspended between Cold War fantasies of informational chokepoints and the banal calm of this handover, Le Carré and Davies also anticipate, more distantly, our own post-truth era, in which all intelligence and information is fungible and debatable; Osnard, in that sense, is very much a creature of the 2020s. At times, this scenario also reminded me of a key plot point in the first season of the French series The Bureau, in which the protagonist, a spy played by Mathieu Kassovitz, experiences what is apparently a common condition when agents return from deep cover – an addiction to mythomania, the compulsion to continue crafting fictional versions of oneself even when the espionage imperative has vanished. Something similar happens in The Tailor of Panama, as America and Britain, so committed to paranoia throughout the Cold War, must now find pretexts to maintain their viligance.

Of course, both Osnard and Pendel are British, and this is a British film through and through, but part of the comedy comes from the way Le Carré imagines Britain’s relationship with America at the cusp of millennium. If imperial Britain exercised power directly and Cold War Britain exercised power through alliance, then this post-Cold War Britain exercises power through narrative – it’s only hope for global relevance is to tell a story that someone in Washington might find plausible or interesting. We see then an eerie echo of Tony Blair’s complicity with the subsequent War of Iraq in Le Carré’s prediction that British influence in the future will mean providing America with the interpretative narratives it requires to maintain global dominance, producing a bizarre post-imperial arrangement in which Britain can remain influential only so long as the United States continues to listen to its stories about how the world operates. Where America increasingly relates to the Canal through the practicalities of economic arrangements, Britain, a much less significant player in the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, can only understand the Canal, and the post-Cold War, through genre, which again makes this Le Carré’s most gleefully metafictive screen adaptation.

For after all, what are Osnard and Pendel doing if not collaborating on a Le Carré narrative, attempting to outplay Le Carré at his own game by crafting a conspiratorial vision of lurid complexity? Their shared investments in this project imbues the film with an extraordinary libidinal intensity, as Osnard embraces Pendel’s fantasias because they suit his ego, like a microcosm of Bond’s parasocial relationship with his fandom. With their mythmaking in the foreground, the Canal becomes a backdrop for western fantasy, full of monumental structures that mirror back the grandeur of the Bridge of the Americas, always looming somewhere in the background. Likewise the gleaming spectacle of the new Panama City core – “Cocaine City,” built on the ruins of the old socialist stronghold destroyed by Manuel Noriega with American aid – feels like the ultimate denouement, or sightline, of all of these shared narratives, the exotic space at which all their fantasies must converge. Boorman beautifully wraps these different spectacles into a technological sublime that revels in the unimaginable scales that govern the Canal, from the minutiae of individual locks to the enormity of water flowing through each day. In one of the most playful sequences he explicitly links this to the film’s own libidinal economy, as we start with incredible shot of a cruise ship humming alongside a modest road bridge, the juxtaposition of scales making it almost impossible to read the image, before pulling back so this becomes the mere backdrop for a “local” musical performance being put on for British expatriates at a riverside café. Finally, we pull back to Osnard sealing the deal with Francesca Deane, an embassy worker played by Catherine McCormack, and the scene splinters into a fractured montage of the two of them dancing and having sex, all with the Canal looming in the background.

Against this hyper-aestheticised backdrop, Le Carré engages in a different kind of dialogue with Fleming, not exactly contradicting his vision but drawing out the latent homosexual regard that was always present. For Bond’s most intimate relationships were always with his villains, structured around a ritualistic mutual regard, elaborate acts of courtship and a frank fascination with each other’s bodies and tastes. In that context, Bond’s continuous heterosexual conquests were a distraction mechanism more than anything else, so when Le Carré removes those conquests we’re left with a world in which men’s most intimae relationships are both homosocial and professional, reserved for bosses, colleagues and enemies. Something of this intimacy pervades Osnard and Pendel’s relationship, except that it’s elevated to a fever pitch as they attempt to co-author a shared fantasy world to shore up against the ruins of empire and the end of history. The result is espionage as homosocial theatre, in which everything is appearance, and “politics” is simply the fantasy concoted by mutual masculine gazes. Pendel often reverts to the “rock of eye,” a tailoring term that refers to the skill of taking in a garment at a glance, without formal measurement, and both men bring that same intuitive taste for appearances to bear here, as the “rock” of the film dissolves into their attempts to outdo in each other in subscribing to their shared universe. All this means that the homosocial element of both Fleming and Le Carré is returned to the surface of the film, in what often feels like a frankly homosexual relationship between Osnard and Pendel. On the one hand Pendel leans heavily into the aestheticism of Savile Row masculinity and continually comments on the way his trousers fit around the “wind socks” of his clients, until this seems to be the most important component of any fitting. Osnard follows suit (pun intended), introducing himself as Pendel’s “fairy godmother,” in their first meeting, and increasing their homosexual proximity with each rendezvous, from the vibrating bed of his sex hotel room, where they jerk up and down in tandem, to the crisis point in their relationship, which Osnard marks by taking them to a gay bar, playfully instructing Pendel to “stop acting so butch” and slow waltzing with him to Caetano Veloso.

Interestingly, this inflection point comes as an attempt to negotiate the role of Louisa, Harry’s wife, who remains somewhat aloof from the libidinal economy of the film, insofar as her day-to-day work with the Canal Authority is counterfactual to the elaborate narratives that the two men are spinning around it. Within Le Carré and Davies’ scheme, Louisa accepts that the twentieth century has ended, and sets herself to work on everyday issues of engineering, healthcare and education that arise in the Canal community, which of course makes it even more important that Osnard re-eroticise her as a personification of the Canal itself. In one of the most evocative scenes, Osnard joins Pendel’s family on a picnic, where Louisa reclines on a hammock over a Canal that has become pastoral, merged into the everyday life of a new post-imperial normality. Yet even as – or especially because – Louisa’s outlook is so pragmatic (“I was raised in the Canal, around military types and engineers like my father”), Osnard reimagines her as an erotic fantasy (“You are the Canal”) and then draws her into the water for a swim and smooch as Harry takes the kids out for a fishing trip. In its own small way, this acts as a microcosm of Osnard’s taste for manufactured crisis, if only the mini-crisis of Pendel spying them as he returns on the boat. Aptly, then, the smooth parallelism of hammock and Canal is disrupted by the same juxtaposition of scales we saw when Osnard seduced Francesa – all of a sudden, as he and Louis are submerged up to their chins, the horizon shifts to the top of the screen and ships return to the horizon, the very large, the very small, the very near and the very distant all subsumed into one fantasmatic tableau. We see here a common thread in Le Carré’s correction of Flemingesque espionage – women are often closer to reality than men, free of their melancholy addiction to grand narratives, much as Louisa rejects Osnard’s advances.

Nevertheless, the parallelism of hammock and Canal is never quite stable in the first place – Boorman shoots it so that the waterway looks as if it’s about to break its banks, and it is this libidinal surfeit, this sense that exotic narrativisation of the Canal is built into the Anglo-American gaze, that propels the strange third act, which sees the Americans briefly invade Panama as a result of Osnard and Pendel’s collaborative narrative. In fact, it’s less a third act than a parody of third acts, as Boorman’s film briefly becomes the very episionage thriller that Osnard and Pendel have conocted, which is to say shot through with Hollywood cliché and the American imaginary, most notably when the showdown is filtered through the consolatory familiarity of the Vietnam film genre, as helicopters arrive over the skyscrapers of Panama City, or even the more primal familiarity of Casablanca, once the airport is shut down and Osnard manages to scramble for one last flight out of the country. In the process of Pendel escalating his fabrications, like successive rewrites of a screenplay, the Brits have sold America a version of Canal that is coterminous with Hollywood history itself, so that “History” eventually arrives stillborn, and Boorman “ends” by repeating his own film as formalistic farce; Osnard repeats his stock flirtation phrase on the plane out of Panama, and we return to an earlier motif of Pendel flipping pancakes for his family, where Boorman freezes midframe for a closing image that is as banal and slapstick as the film deserves.  

It all amounts to the most playful and metafictive of Le Carré narratives – an interrogation of the storytelling impulse within his body of work, and a tacit acknowledgment that his novels are themselves complicit in the very obsessive mythmaking that the film critiques. Two final details stood out for me at this outermost edge of self-referentiality. First, the use of Comic Sans for all the credit sequences, a bizarre choice for such a prestige film, even in the late 90s, until you remember that this all unfolds during the desktop computer era, when this particular font still brimmed with an uncanny ability to simulate spontaneity, the authenticity of human writing, in ways that beautifully mirror Pendel and Osnard’s storytelling. Second, of course, is the presence of Harold Pinter as Pendel’s mentor Uncle Benny. At first, Pendel describes Uncle Benny as his Savile Row mentor, the last of the great London tailors, but Osnard quickly deduces that Pendel never worked in Savile Row, and that Benny was simply a petty criminal who taught Pendel his most crucial skill set – storytelling. And that encapsulates the film precisely – the master playwright giving his formal imprimatur to characters who are co-authoring a screenplay, while himself appearing in that screenplay as literary-demonic muse, figurehead for the dark powers of narrative.