Stranger than fact: Nabokov's "The Assistant Producer" and Rohmer's "Triple Agent"

It is a notorious, and notoriously unresolved, tale of espionage: a one-time White Russian general, in exile in Paris, connives with both the Soviets and the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Hoping to use a day out with his wife, once a popular singer in her homeland, as his alibi, he slips away from her for a brief time, during which he oversees the kidnapping of another general, his superior at the White veteran association he belongs to. That general is never seen again. The triple agent, confronted with a note in which his victim confides of misgivings about his colleague and the meeting he arranged, slips away from his would-be captors. He, too, is never seen again. Seeking a scapegoat, the authorities pounce on the agent's wife, who is convicted and dies in prison. 

When Vladimir Nabokov adapted the story of General Miller (the victim), Nicholas Skobline (the agent), and Nadine Plevitskaia (the wife), for one of his short fictions, he actually cast it in the form of a film, a melodrama by turns florid and tawdry and sometimes rife with that quality, poshlust, which Nabokov so beautifully elaborates on in his study of of Gogol. (If you haven't read that study, by all means do; in any case, for our purposes here, let's say that poshlust stands for "aspirational kitsch.") "Tonight we shall go to the movies," its mysterious narrator of "The Assistant Producer" says at the beginning, before lavishing some rueful contempt on the singer he refers to as "La Slavska."

"The producer is a mere assistant because Russian history has begotten a stream of B-pictures that are in their way as distorted as the monstrous jokes perpetrated by Soviet revisionists," the ever-astute Nabokovian Arthur Appel, Jr., notes in his wonderful book Nabokov's Dark Cinema. Discussing the story's cinematic antecedents and analogs, he notes that the story's "bit players are as accomplished as Akim Tamiroff and Mischa Auer." He mentions Lewis Milestone's The North Star, released in the same year that "The Assistant Producer" was published, 1943. For myself, Nabokov's literary mise-en-scene is rather evocative of von Sternberg:

"And then, in traditional contrast, pat comes a mighty burst of music and song with a rhythmic clapping of hands and stamping of booted feet and we seen General Golubkov's staff in full revelry—a lithe Georgian dancing with a dagger, the self-conscious samovar reflecting distorted faces, the Slavska throwing her head back with a throaty laugh, and the fat man of the corps, horribly drunk, braided collar undone, greasy lips pursed for a bestial kiss, leaning across the table (close-up of an overturned glass) to hug—nothingness, for wiry and perfectly sober General Golubkov has deftly removed her and now, as they both stand facing the gang, says in a cold, clear voice: 'Gentlemen, I want to present you my bride'—and in the stunned silence that follows, a stray bullet from outside chances to shatter the dawn-blue windowpane, after which the roar of applause greets the glamourous couple."

There are no scenes of such vulgar exuberance in Triple Agent, the imagining of the Miller/Skobline/Plevitskaia affair that Eric Rohmer made in 2004. The Skobline figure, here named Fiodor and played with oft-disturbing intensity by Serge Renko, is never even seen in uniform, let alone celebrating with his troops. No, the film is set entirely in Paris, opening with the 1936 election of the Popular Front. It eschews action quite deliberately; everything you might expect to see in a film with the title Triple Agent is left off screen. Which is not to say the film is without suspense, or a form of action. 

In perhaps the most crucial departure from the known facts of the case, Rohmer completely changes the wife's identity. Rather than a fellow Russian, and a popular singer of gypsy songs, Fiodor's wife is a shy, beautiful painter of Greek origin named Arsinoé (Katerina Didaskalou). Not very much seems to happen in the film's first quarter. Arsinoé makes the acquaintance of the couple upstairs, who are Communists; she and Fiodor and the neighbors have some intriguing conversations about art and politics, and figurative versus abstract art. These don't move the plot along a bit, but contribute a resonant thematic element. We are given the impression that Fiodor and Arsinoé have a relatively quiet life, but are passionately attached to each other. But as political events ramp up, Fiodor's perversity begins to reveal itself. His allegiances seem to be all over the place, and when it's pointed out to him, he launches elaborately improvised self-justifications. And when he's not doing that, he almost waxes smug about his duplicity. At a lunch with a cousin, a former Russian royal looking for work with Fiodor's organization, and right in front of his wife, he taunts the young man: "Sometimes it's wiser to be truthful than to lie, so you won't be believed. Don't you believe me?" And then fixes on him the gaze that we see in the screen cap at top.

Then follows one of the most extraordinary series of shots in Rohmer. Not at all known for quick cutting, he almost jumps from the medium closeup at top to the one below, and then cuts three more times in less than five seconds, thusly: 

 

 

 

 

"Can't you decide?" he asks his wife, coldly. The quick cuts work like a glass of cold water thrown in one's face; it's a turning point in the film, and in the characters' marriage. By the time the climax is at hand, Fiodor has got Arsinoé so confused that she breaks down in tears of joy when he emphatically tells her that he's not a Nazi. And he's not, probably. But what is he, exactly. Against a backdrop of political intrigue, Rohmer presents a moral tale of how people make themselves unknowable not only to each other but to themselves. 

Nabokov, on the other hand, examines role-playing, and, as always, the gap between reality and perception, and wrings a peculiar poignancy out of a scenario into which he has injected very little of what you might call the "human element." "The story brilliantly inverts life and art," observes Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, "[E]vents appear to be purloined from movieland, but in fact come straight from life—which itself seems to have imitated bad art."

"If 'history' means 'a written account of events'...then let us inquire who actually—what scribes, what secretaries—took it down and how qualified they were for the job," Nabokov said in an interview with Phillip Oakes in 1969. "The Assistant Producer" serves up "history" twice removed, not just as a movie, but as a Hollywood movie (as La Slavska arrives at Golubkov's camp, the audience is shown "a plain littered with bodies somewhere in Ventura County) out of Nabokov's imagination. It was the first short story he wrote in English, three years after coming to America from Paris...where he had been a neighbor of General Miller.

Comments

[Arthur S.]

Interesting. Triple Agent reminded me a lot of Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers, which is more Nabokovian than the Rohmer in its wittiness and sense of decadence, in that it's a spy film that depends on language, role-play and timing.

Rohmer said in an interview that he wanted to convey the mysteriousness of interaction. How little people know of each other even in marriage and how this relates to an event bereft of resolutions. I love the fact that even in the end one doesn't know if Fyodor betrayed his wife, left her to die or was simply caught up in the machinery of his actions. He disappears...

[Jesús]

Beautiful, enlightening analysis. I just watched the film for the 3rd time since it was released. I know Rohmer's work quite well (I studied it for a few years) and to me "Triple Agent" is one of his greatest works (which might sound exaggerated for someone almost at the end of his career). And I agree with you -- Renko's performance is simply (and truly) stunning.

Thanks for your article.

[Reno]

"Rohmer presents a moral tale of how people make themselves unknowable not only to each other but to themselves."

Thank you for this ...

[Eric Stanton]

Thanks for this excellent essay, Glenn.

I was inspired by your post to re-read "The Assistant Producer" last night; it had been more than twenty years since I first read it.

Nabokov's story is urbane and exquisite, of course, but I prefer Rohmer's wry film. Your observation that Nabokov "has injected very little of what you might call 'the human element'" into his story is very much to the point. Nabokov's tale is beautifully wrought, but Rohmer's film, which is carefully grounded in the atmosphere and politics of its place and time, and more invested in its characters (to put it mildly) is more moving, IMO. Not to say that anyone interested in the subject shouldn't dive into the Nabokov, which certainly has its rewards.