Terrorists in Love

IT'S ROMANCE WITH a twist: Boy meets girl, boy gives girl bomb, boy loses girl. And, like a good love story, it ends with boy and girl walking off happily into the sunset. In between the meeting and the losing, however, there's so much plot that if you blink, you might be permanently in the dark. But if you don't mind a movie that makes you think (or if you've read the John Le Carre novel), the film version of Little Drummer Girl is worth the extra effort.

No plot summary can do the movie or the book justice--but suffice it to say it makes following soap operas seem like child's play. Charly (Diane Keaton) is an American actress in England with romantic yearnings for a cause. When she goes to hear a speech by a bemasked and decidedly debonair PLO member, Charly falls hard for him and only slightly less hard for his message. A part in a wine commercial brings her to the island of Mykonos where--surprise, surprise--she meets up with the handsome terrorist.

In the meantime, a group of Isracli activists are hot on the trail of two PLO terrorist leaders whom they suspect are behind a series of West German bombings. The point of intersection between Charly and the Israelis comes in the form of Michel, one of the PLO terrorists, who it seems has a serendipitous penchant for bombshells--both kinds.

ENTER, CHARLY. The wine commercial turns out to be an Israeli ruse to lure her to Greece where, according to the plan, she will ensnare the randy Michel and his brother Khalil with her womanly wiles.

The rest of the story, which is unfolded by flashing from one scene to the next at break-neck speed, is only slightly less confusing. With numerous cases of mistaken identity and plots within plots within plots, neither Charly nor the audience has the foggiest notion of what's going on much of the time. While director George Roy Hill is to be praised for his attempt to recreate the suspense of the novel, at times he would have done well to opt for a little less mystery and a little more clarity.

In spite of this invigorating (or bewildering, as the case may be) pace, the film works, if only because of Le Carre's tightly woven plot. After 40 minutes of confusion the disparate threads come together and the rest of us, if not Charly, can sit back and relax.

As Charly, the flightly, tough-on-the-outside-soft-on-the-inside actress, Keaton is wonderful. Minus Woody Allen and Warren Beatty who tend to upstage her, Keaton's performance is genuinely fresh and appealing. Her ditzyness, which was overdone in Annie Hall and Manhattan, is put to good use here. When the Israelis draft her to drive a car wired with tons of explosives, she accidentally puts it into reverse and crashes into a tree at top speed, much to the amusement of her hardened Israeli cohorts, who haven't had this much fun in years. Even terrorists have a sense of humor.

THE FATHERLY LEADER of the group, Klaus Kinski, is nothing short of eerie. His restrained tension saves the script, which at times is too obvious in its attempt to show how even nice guys can get tough in times of war. For instance, in one scene Kinski is shown simultaneously ordering a PLO girl killed and calling his wife "to check up on family news." His understated brutality--he always seems on the edge of exploding--teamed with his paternal aura save scenes like this from heavy-handedness. In many ways, this is his film.

As the handsome Israeli hero Joseph, Yorg Voyagis is slightly leaden. His and Charly's love affair is sacrificed to the more explosive aspects of the plot, so that when Charly says she loves him, it leaves us cold, Sami Frey as the crazy Khalil is a terrific villain whose wild, rolling eyes belie a steel trap of a mind.

The scenery is also delightful, with locations switching from Dorset, England to sparkling Mykonos to war-ravaged Beirut. The chilling shots of a PLO training camp bring home the Middle East conflict more sharply than any news report--and that more than justifies the sometimes puzzling plot.