Despite the Falling Snow

Author Sid­ney Shel­don writes about hero­ines attempt­ing to nav­i­gate their way through a man’s world, con­fronting the dan­gers and desires of the heart. It’s a for­mu­la not to be sniffed at – he has sold over 300 mil­lion books dur­ing his 50 year career.

As writer and direc­tor, Shamim Sarif brings her own racy, Shel­don-esque espi­onage romance to the big screen, and she sticks to the above for­mu­la. The sto­ry takes us into post-stal­in­ist Rus­sia at the height of the Cold War, with Katya (Rebec­ca Fer­gu­son) as an Amer­i­can spy tasked with steal­ing intel from do-good­er Russ­ian politi­cian, Alexan­der (Sam Reid). Katya’s mis­sion, how­ev­er, becomes mud­dled when – would you believe – she falls in love with him.

With polit­i­cal ten­sions sim­mer­ing, the snowy streets por­tray­ing life in ​’50s Sovi­et Union feel like a fit­ting alle­go­ry for the icy stand­off between the two pow­er­house coun­tries. Dis­play­ing promis­es of a pol­ished melo­dra­ma, the arche­typ­al romance between between Katya and Alexan­dre (on which the plot large­ly feeds) is more mawk­ish than emo­tion­al­ly charged. Sarif employs tech­niques such as slow motion part­ing ges­tures to pro­vide us with cues to start caring.

The plot bounces back and forth between time peri­ods, jump­ing from a stylised peri­od dra­ma of the ​’50s to New York and Moscow of the ​’90s. And it’s a lit­tle jar­ring. This is also com­pound­ed by the ques­tion­able choice of cast­ing Fer­gu­son as not only the spy hero­ine but also as her daugh­ter 30 years lat­er, the same per­son just with a hip­per hair­cut to ush­er in the era. Assum­ing an under­cov­er iden­ti­ty is an inte­gral part of Katya’s pro­fes­sion, so it is not imme­di­ate­ly clear that they are dif­fer­ent peo­ple. It’s a con­fus­ing devel­op­ment which real­ly could have been avoided.

On the plus side, Charles Dance pro­vides a praise­wor­thy turn as the old­er Alexan­dre, who fea­tures more promi­nent­ly towards the final act. His refresh­ing under­state­ment con­trasts with the more self-con­scious­ly stylised leads, which appears to owe more to Sarif’s direc­tion than their inter­pre­ta­tion of the char­ac­ters. There’s great poten­tial here, but the exe­cu­tion is far too clunky.